Ponies in space
by Saphroneth
Summary: Science fiction setting version of Friendship is Magic, styled on the works of David Weber. Confound these ponies, et cetera.
1. Chapter 1

With a great flare of transfer energy, coruscating "wings" of force hundreds of kilometres across heralded the arrival in system of TMS _Harmony_. The light from the wings shaded from violet to blue, to yellow, and finally faded away as a deep red.

"Clean transfer, ma'am." The ship navigator said. "Wings have charge reading at zero, and no warning lights on their status."

The Wings were used for hyperspace travel, mainly to dissipate and harness the enormous energies common in the higher, empty dimensions. Jumping into a star system was routine compared to some of the things that ships could do within hyperspace, but it still imposed significant stress on the Wing generators if poorly handled.

"Very good, miss Drops. Configure the ship for sublight and take us in system."

"Planetary orbit, Captain?"

"No thank you. We're due a maintenance cycle, and that means heading to Epona station."

The pegasus nodded, and her wings twitched slightly as she reconnected to the ship systems. Almost all navigators and fighter pilots in the fleet were pegasi, their natural sense for three dimensions giving them an immeasurable advantage, and the Commonwealth had invested a lot of time into developing neural feeds that let them use the sophisticated nerves leading into the wings for flying ships. It had clearly paid off, something very few who saw the contrast between pegasus-flown ships and others could argue against.

"I make it two hours and fifty minutes to parking orbit, Captain."

"Excellent. XO, you have the watch."

The bright pink earth pony practically bounced over to the watch chair, and Captain Rarity Belle, dame of the order of the Blue Diamond, gave a tolerant smile. Countess Pie was an… _unusual_ Executive Officer, or XO as the colloquial went, but in their two years of experience together they'd become a good team. Rarity's relatively aloof style and pedantic intolerance of flaws might normally have made the crew feel uncomfortable, but with Pinkamena running around making sure everything was shipshape it just meant they appreciated the contrast with the exuberant XO.

Her horn glowed briefly, and the lift doors opened. "I'll be in my cabin, XO. Let me know if anything untoward develops."

"Yes Sir!"

* * *

Rarity heard a muffled voice from outside with the high pitch of her XO, and sent the open command to the door without bothering to wait for her to ask.

"Aww… how'd you know I was there?"

"Your voice, XO. Specifically the unique, one might even say penetrating quality. Perhaps the admiralty should see if we can weaponize the pitch to cut right through battle armour."

"Nah, silly! For that you need about two and a half thousand times the frequency, and to modulate it with a series of lower tones to build up stress on individual molecular bonds, with the motion at the right amplitude they don't just reform!"

Rarity blinked for a moment. "Right, I forgot, you're the heir to a mineral extraction fortune. I always seem to let that slip." She'd once met the rest of her family, and they were all to a pony much less extroverted than Pinkie. Though they had mentioned that her life in the navy had mellowed her considerably, which made Rarity a little glad they hadn't been in the same academy class. Imagining Pinkie _more_ bouncy made her head spin.

And it lent credence to the rumour of the twenty-four hour party she'd held for the entire years' midshipmen and -women. Or to the one that it had taken her two years to stop singing the solution for everything.

"Don't worry about it. Besides, my sisters are the heirs – I'm just a minority stockholder."

"Fifteen percent may technically be a minority, but – oh, never mind. I wanted to discuss our newest orders with you."

"We've got new orders already? But we haven't been docked for more than an hour!"

"Exactly." Rarity floated the dataslate over to her second in command. "Take a look."

Pinkie grabbed it in a front hoof and glanced through it. The manoeuvre still confused the technicians who had designed the short-range gravity manipulator that was _theoretically _necessary to hold things in hooves.

"Reassignment to _Flag_ship? Ooh, that means more people on board! I can finally dust off the admiral's quarters, and we'll have to welcome them aboard, and-"

"Keep looking."

Pinkie subsided and scanned through the documentation. "Uhhh… four star Admiral? Wow, I wondered if they'd left off a word when I read 'Admiral' but they didn't… Oh, this Admiral was recently elevated from ONI." Pinkie looked up, whimsy fading. "I see your concern."

"Yes. It doesn't have much about her earlier achievements, but she came up from Commodore inside the Office of Naval Intelligence. I don't know why, and I don't like the idea of someone without actual tactical expertise commanding my ship."

"Only name given is Duchess of Green Ridge… oh! I think I met her once! There was a party, and she'd just been elevated to the peerage-"

"My goodness. She was elevated personally?" Rarity considered the information. "I thought I didn't recognize the title. Well, that _is_ interesting. And to a Duchy? Even more interesting. What's she like?"

"A bit introverted. She didn't really enjoy herself at the party, which is a pity even if it was more formal than I tend to prefer. She was a captain of the list, then." Captain of the List was fairly prestigious in the ranking system of the Equestrian navy, indicating someone who was guaranteed with time to make Flag rank. "Hang on…" The pink pony scanned through her memory. "Sparkle. That was it. Twilight Sparkle."

Rarity raised an eyebrow. "Indeed? Wasn't there some big news furore about her a few years back?" She picked up a second dataslate, and began searching. "Here we are. She was the senior surviving officer in a battle with the Dogs." Diamond Dogs were a belligerent power in near space, who were perpetually in a state of almost-war with most others nearby.

Rarity found a reference on the article, and continued reading. "And a year after that her first command, the _Bluebell_, lost the sublight engines in an engagement with pirates. I don't see how… ah!" Rarity was silent for a moment. "My word. She _is_ unusual."

"Waaaait. If she lost the engines, how'd she get home?" Pinkie asked.

Since the Wings were generated somewhere completely different to the sublight drive, the loss of one without affecting the other was entirely possible. However, to get past the limit around every star that disallowed hyperspace travel, ships had to have some means of moving in normal-space – the sublight drive. The most common form was also known as a drive wedge for the placement of the invulnerable planar force discs it generated. Other drive systems were more efficient, but none offered that kind of ancillary protection.

Hyperspace was a different matter, of course. Waves of focused force crossed it, allowing a ship's Wings to catch them and coast as if on thermals.

"She used her telekinesis to drive the entire _Bluebell_ outside the hyper limit, and then in system once the ship got back to Equestria. Lucky there was a hyper wave to use for propulsion, though – I can't imagine she had much energy to spare to build up speed in hyper itself." Rarity frowned. "It doesn't necessarily say anything about her tactical competence, but at least she's _very_ strong magically. She even got the Golden Horn for it, and it looks like it let her make list as well."

Pinkie whistled. The Golden Horn was a unicorn-exclusive decoration representing achievement in magic beyond what was normally possible. Equivalent decorations existed for pegasi and earth ponies, and all three were awarded rarely.

"Well, I suppose we'll have to make the best of it." Rarity said. "Do you want to stay for a cup of tea?"

"Nah, I should get over to engineering. There's a petty officer I have to review, to see if she's viable to go to get training for a commission or a warrant."

"We also serve who push pens." Rarity chuckled. "Makes a welcome change from combat, anyway."

* * *

"Ah, Twilight. Come in."

The newly minted Admiral walked nervously to where one of her Diarchs was reclining. "You asked to see me, your majesty?"

"Please, Twilight, we've known one another long enough. Call me Celestia."

"Very well, Y- Celestia."

"Tell me." The Alicorn turned to give Twilight a penetrating stare. "Do you think that my assigning you to a field command was a mistake?"

"No, of course not!"

The Pincess sighed. "Let me rephrase. Is it what you_ want_ to do? And don't be afraid of speaking your mind. I have few enough Admirals that I choose them carefully. I want your opinion."

"Then… I'm not sure it was a good idea, no. I've not commanded more than one ship in an actual fleet… well, ever. I keep track of the theory, of course, and I occasionally run the odd wargame in the sim tanks at Shetland, but… I don't know if I'm ready for it."

"Thank you for your honesty. And in truth you won't be commanding a fleet in the conventional sense. Your ONI background actually gives you a lot of what I want in you. I need someone who can act as a roving troubleshooter, with the authority to take command of the situation and a good team to go along with them. That's part of the reason I got you reassigned. Another part is that, well, you sell yourself short. I've seen those "odd wargames" you mentioned, and your record is very good."

"I've never beaten Storm Wing." She protested, before adding "Well, not in an even fight, anyway."

"Dear me. There's a reason he's assigned to the Shetland Island academy tactical simulator, and that's because he's the best fleet tactician to come out of the Principality and Commonwealth in hundreds of years. If you could beat him in an even fight with any sort of regularity, you'd have _his_ job." Celestia straightened up. "In any case, you've entirely failed to convince me you have anything more than nerves. The personnel bureau has already assigned you a staff, though of course the final choice is yours. And before you ask, the reason I'm handling this personally is because you are going to _be_ my personal representative, as my admiral without portfolio. I'm going to need you to be used to a certain… closeness, to the levers of power."

A chime sounded. Celestia levitated her comms unit out of a dish. "Ah, I see the _Perilune_ has just come over the hyper wall, so my sister will be returning in a few hours. You're with Sixth fleet officially, though the core of that formation's only eight fast dreadnaughts, most of them the hybrid-carrier variant. Take a while to get them worked up." Twilight began to leave, recognizing the dismissal, but Celestia continued. "Oh, and Twilight?"

The young duchess turned. "Yes?"

"Stay safe. I've invested a lot of time and care into your career, and into you personally."

* * *

"Spike?"

Twilight's draconic flag lieutenant looked up. "Yes, Twi?"

"Mind giving me a rundown on the staff that personnel decided to give me?"

"Oh, of course. Hang on a moment." He flicked through his files. "First off, your flag captain is Dame Rarity Belle, Order of the Blue Diamond. The _Harmony_ has been her ship for the last two years, and she's done some good things with it – they were in the fleet action last year at Perchhek, and she managed to come out of that with only a bit of superficial armour damage. She's credited with partial kills on three enemy capital ships and completely gutted another one in that battle, and in an earlier chase action she forced two enemy battlecruisers into the rings of the local gas giant. Apparently her affinity for crystals helped her plot a course through the debris field, because TMS _Harmony_ must have been half again the size of those enemy ships…"

"Thank you. What about her personality profile?"

"Something of a perfectionist, which has come back to bite her on occasion, but she's got the talent to work around it and it's lessened since she got her current XO."

"Okay, we'll move on to her. Who's the executive officer, then?"

"Countess Pinkamena Diane Pie, of _that_ Pie family. The mineral one. Apparently she had less talent for the family business and her mark indicates that – she's highly extroverted, and… well, it says 'hyperactive' here."

"I shudder to think." Twilight looked out of the viewport, hoping to catch a glimpse of Epona station, the hub of the Commonwealth's navy. "What of the ponies assigned to my staff?"

"Well, you've got an outsized one thanks to your unusual position. Ah – staff xenobiologist? That's a new one… anyway, that position's taken by one Lt. Lyra Heartstrings. Quite a talented musician, but her true passion is in the differences between cultures and races. She apparently sometimes acts bipedal just to get more of an insight into such a different way of thinking and acting."

"I'd say she was strange, but I can hardly talk." Twilight observed drily. "Tactical?"

"Pegasus, Commander, specializes in stealth systems and detection. Good scores from Shetland and been involved in a few independent actions. The only note here that might be a problem is that she's not very assertive. I think you might have to prod her for solutions that other tac officers might volunteer. Oh, sorry. Name of Fluttershy – just the one." Spike tapped a claw on the screen. "Next is fighter ops. Wow, this is a real jackpot. Colonel Rainbow Dash."

"I've heard of her!" Twilight said, startled. "Wasn't she the one who broke the airspeed record on academy review day?"

Spike chuckled. "Yep, she's the one. Right through the sound barrier, no powered assistance at all. She's lived up to it, too, despite a string of demerits and comments almost as long as my arm for insolence and brashness."

"Fighter jocks. Good thing we use the flying commander system, or she'd go nuts."

The head of the flight ops of a fleet was originally intended to be on their mothership, coordinating their tactics from the position of relative safety, but in practice so many highly skilled fighter jocks had deliberately avoided promotion that instead a dual command system was set up. Dash would be the one who spoke for the pilots at planning meetings and at the highest levels, and she would also fly her command fighter in the attacks themselves. Instead, the assistant tactical command officer, or ATCO, for the fleet would provide the distanced view.

The system had been copied from the fighter's inventors and most enthusiastic proponents, the Gryphons. One wit had said that the only reason the Gryphon Nation had ships larger than sixty metres in length was that, push came to shove, something had to carry the fighters.

"Out of curiosity, what's our fighter complement going to be like?"

"Uhhh… here we are. Jeez, I think the Princess was sincere about wanting you as a troubleshooter. She's certainly got to have pulled some strings for this kind of flight deck. Spitfire, Surprise, Echo, Soarin'… not a one of them who's not an ace, and one of them has a special note…" Spike paused. "What."

"Spike?"

"The evaluator put a comment here – "We don't know how she does it, but she does." Apparently one of the pilots runs two fighters at once."

"You're kidding." Twilight floated the dataslate over to her. "You're not kidding. Her eyes are exotropic, and she flies a different fighter with each one. I didn't know that was possible."

"Nobody did. Sort of like breaking the sound barrier, or taking a Dreadnaught through a ring system, or… say… moving an entire ship around under telekinetic control?"

"Right, point made." She gave an embarrassed smile at the memory of that situation. At the time it had been desperate, more a case of acting than thinking… but with years between then and now, the idea of a single Unicorn pushing her own ship around like a bicycle was almost amusing.

"Oh, look. There's the station."

Spike had managed to distract her long enough that they were almost docked. "Well, we'd better get ready."

* * *

"Next, Countess Pinkamena Diane Pie, my Exec. I'm sure she agrees with me that it's lovely to have you on board, Admiral. Simply lovely."

"Yeah! And we'll have to hold a party to let everyone get to know each other!"

Twilight frowned for a moment. "I didn't know an _Alicorn_-class had enough, well, room for an event hall."

"Weeell, there's a small one on Flag deck, but there's a much bigger one right here! The boat bay is built to accommodate pinnaces from other ships bringing captains over for conferences, so without them there's easily the room to fit all but a station watch in here! I'll get one organized right away!"

One of the _Harmony_'s officers waiting to be introduced rolled her eyes as Pinkie bounced off. "She'll calm down eventually, never you mind."

"That's something of a relief, ah…"

"Name's Applejack. I'm the chief engineer on this bucket o'bolts. Hope you never need to speak to me professionally, 'cause if you do, something's gone wrong." The earth pony nodded amicably. "Nice to meet you. And I'll introduce my brother when I can. He's the head of the Marine contingent."

Twilight glanced at her flag lieutenant, who consulted a slate. "Major Macintosh?"

"Yep. Big Mac, that's him." She peered at Spike. "Well, can't say I've seen a dragon before. Oh, sorry, I'm being rude again."

"No, it's no trouble. Ah, Captain? Is that everyone?"

"Almost. There's still one of the marines, who seems to be late. I wouldn't normally mention her specifically, but in your case it's a point of special interest."

"Oh?" Twilight frowned. "I can't think why…"

With a BANG, a large cloud of blue smoke appeared to Applejack's left, in a clear area of the boat bay. Several ponies twitched to their side arms, and Twilight's horn lit with a wide-area stun spell, before she realized that the magical signature felt… familiar.

"Behold! The Great And Powerful head of the magic support company, battle mage without peer, Major-"

"Trixie!" Twilight said delightedly. "I haven't seen you in years!"

The smoke evaporated, revealing a blue unicorn in field harness (marked with a Captain's insignia, not that of a Major, but the ancient tradition of courtesy promotions still held – there could be only one captain aboard a ship) and with a standard-issue combat staff on one flank. "And look at you, Twilight! Who would have thought that you would ever make Admiral back at Shetland?"

"Yeah, about that. Why did you switch to the marines?"

"You know my talents have never been in anything particular." Trixie explained. "Except misdirection. So I realized that the place where that would be most use is on the battlefield, and they were delighted to have me because I can do pretty much anything. As one might expect of the Great and Powerful Trixie, of course."

"Of course," Twilight echoed, remembering the spectacular derailment of a graduation ceremony. "Still setting up fights with Ursas first and working out plans later?"

"Oh, shut up." The blue unicorn blushed in embarrassment. "It all worked out."

"Only because Princess Luna was giving the main speech!"

The two stared at one another for a moment, then burst out laughing.

"Thanks, Trixie, I needed that. Well, I'll try to invite you to my Admiral's Table one of these days."

"Nice seeing you again, Twilight."

The magic-support officer vanished with a second loud BANG, and Twilight settled herself. "Well, thank you all for meeting me. As I understand it, much of my staff have yet to embark and I'll be tied up for the next few days with paperwork, but hopefully after that we can run some simulator exercises. Even if the ship's refit keeps it out of space for longer."

"Sounds interesting. Tell me, dear, do you know much about the fleet of which you're our Admiral?"

"Oh, well, I know it's going to be smaller than normal formations – that is, the permanent core is going to be four divisions of Dreadnaughts, and other forces attached on an as-needed basis. We're going to be more of an on-call force, really… I'm not sure what more I can tell you than that. Oh, I did find that parts of your refits are going to involve some of the more recent innovations in technology, so the Engineering department's going to be kept busy." She nodded at Applejack. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go get started on that paperwork."

* * *

"What th' hell happened to my ship!"

Applejack stared at the schematic. She'd gone to sleep last night with the idea that the changes to the ship itself would be fairly minor, and woken up to find that every single weapon mount was being removed and replaced. The chase armament was being revamped entirely to replace it with a pure energy loadout, and the broadsides were mostly missile with six each of the larger hatches that indicated bays for fighters.

"And how in tarnation am I supposed to get a hold of fighter engineers? We're already over establishment…"

"I heard it was a change because of the new off-bore missile launchers we're getting." One of her engineers commented. "Notice how the missile cells are in sets of six, with all the support gear in the middle? That's saving space, and it lets us pack in the fighters as well as a more sophisticated engineer's shop. And we can get off a full and very heavy salvo, in any direction you care to name, from both broadsides at once."

"Suppose." Applejack allowed grudgingly. "And suppose all the extra point defence and heavier shields are going to make sure damage control has less work, as well…"

* * *

"Welcome aboard, Colonel Dash. I hope you find Sixth Fleet to your liking."

"It seems like I will. I got a look at my squadron and fighters, and I think I can say. Awesome. Those the new _Auroras?_"

Twilight glanced at Spike, who nodded. "Yes. First wing in production."

"Great! Oh, I noticed we're one below establishment strength on the roster – I have twelve fighter bays on the _Harmony_, and two spare fighters in flat-pack, but only eleven pilots. Is that right?"

"Yes. One Derpy is part of your command group."

"Oh, _her._ Right, makes sense." Dash shrugged her wings. "Let me know when the rest of the pilots are on board. I want to get drilling! The kinds of moves these fighters can pull take practice!"

"Of course. Oh, my ATCO should be arriving on the next shuttle, you might want to meet her. She'll be your below-deck coordinator."

Dash grinned. "And I'm grateful for it! Can't imagine me trying to sit behind a desk all the time, I'd go completely mad!"

Twilight returned the grin. "With all due respect, Colonel, you're already mad. You broke the sound barrier on review day."

"Hah! You heard about that, then…" Dash rubbed the back of her neck with a hoof.

"Everyone on that side of the planet either heard or saw it, and most of the rest of the Commonwealth population saw the news articles." Twilight chuckled. "Still, I suppose anyone who can steer at that kind of speed must be a great pilot."

"You bet!" Dash crowed, confidence back in spades. "I can take out an entire Gryphon squadron in only a minute!"

"Er, yes."

A young voice rang across the deck. "Oh, wow!"

A purple and orange blur skidded across the boat bay at about torso height and resolved itself into a pegasus Ensign with the insignia of a tactical track officer. The newcomer saluted both senior officers, her short wings at attention.

"It is! Colonel Dash, I'm so glad to be working with you!"

Twilight glanced again at Spike. "This is Ensign..."

"Scootaloo. Late bloomer." He murmured back. "Doctors say she should get her mark and her wings in fully in the next couple of years, but she hasn't had a chance to develop proper flight instincts yet. She wants to be a pilot and _worships_ the Colonel."

"Oh, joy. And we have one of them working with the other."

"Yes. She's Fluttershy's assistant."

"I thought as much." Twilight checked that none of the crew were close enough to overhear, then bent down to whisper to Spike. "Sound out the schedules of the home fleet and administration bureau admirals, would you? I think it's time to get those exercises going."

* * *

Twilight sipped some of her tea. "Thank you, Admiral Star, for agreeing to this. I know you have a busy schedule."

"Oh, it's nothing, Sparkle. Or should I call you Admiral Green Ridge?" Magic Star replied. "Truth be told, after so long in weapons development I'd like to see how some of these toys do from the other side. I can use the preparation for my next meeting with Storm Wing."

"Just Twilight, please. And we all know that any preparation anyone can get is fully worthwhile." Twilight volunteered. "Spike?"

The dragon handed over some paper files, and a pair of dataslates. Magic Star took them in her telekinetic grip and began reading them over. "I see, fortified base attack. Interesting… highly useful against Dogs, of course, those escort ships they have fight like fortresses sometimes… and it highlights a strength of the new design philosophy. Though of course," the two Admirals shared a wry smile, and finished the aphorism together. "No strength survives a smart enemy."

"You'll note I'm letting you plan without having to pretend you don't know anything." Twilight pointed out. "I'm a little concerned that the command crews might have premature victory disease with all the new technology, so I won't object if you cut them a little down to size."

* * *

"Right." Twilight looked around her conference table at the eight ship captains, two tactical officers, three marines and single fighter commander.

"Now, that exercise didn't go _quite_ as planned, did it?"

A few of the captains winced. The exercise had been performed in a mined-out section of the Crown Belt asteroids, and the intent had been for the dreadnaughts to deliver precise time-on-target fire to "defensive satellites", the fighters to clear out "weapon emplacements" as well as handle enemy fighters, and the marines to perform a full brigade drop to capture a mock base built for just this sort of training exercise on the largest local asteroid.

Instead… well, Twilight kept reminding herself that each _individual_ ship, and each _individual _fighter, and each_ individual_ Marine battalion had performed well. The problem was their lack of coordination.

Entire fighter squadrons only managed to hit a few "emplacements" while their covering units got caught up in individual dogfights and let the simulated enemy take out the ones in the bomber role.

The missile salvos had come in over an inexcusable thirty second spread, giving the simulated point defence ample time to handle them and then, with the time available to them, begin firing _back_. For unknown reasons, _Stellar _and _Brindle_ had undergone pattern reject and began their own private point-defence war against the base salvoes. Neither ship had "survived" the barrage.

The marine units had done fairly well, all things considered, but the winnowing dealt to their assault shuttles by the active base defences had left the chain of command full of holes, five of the eight battalions lacking an officer above the rank of Lieutenant. Macintosh's unit, kept relatively safe by Trixie's spectacular illusion of an entire false shuttle squadron, had tried to organize the remainder - but failed - and the resultant casualty counts didn't really bear thinking about.

_Oh, well, at least it happened in simulation._

"Right, first things first. The barrage. Now, I know that most of you are good captains, with good ships. And that's part of the problem, you're all used to calling the shots yourselves. But in this situation, as soon as one ship unmasks, the clock is ticking. And it's the role of the Flag captain to act as tactical deputy. Dame Rarity, in short, is who should have been calling the shots."

She spared a moment to look over at Sparkler, the only other captain to sequence her fire correctly. "And well done to those of you who remembered that."

"Next, Pierce and Star. I understand that your ships are the newest in the squadron, so they have the best canned routines for antimissile defence. But any canned routine has a counter, and the simulation notes did say that a previous attack had gone in and failed. Make sure that your tac officers work up some variations on the theme, because without them a skilled enemy will do exactly what the simulation did – they'll send in a barrage calculated to confuse your computers."

Canned routines were the "default settings" for a missile defence network, or an attack, or almost anything. But they were there not as doctrine but as a resource to work from – using the exact same routine that had already been shown to the enemy was like playing cards with a marked deck.

"Colonel Dash. I think you need some more emphasis on teamwork between squadrons. And Ensign Scootaloo, your rank doesn't mean all you can do is give suggestions to the squadron commanders. You're in charge of fighter ops coordination in battle, act like it."

"Finally, I think we need to establish something regarding the marine units. As of now, Macintosh is breveted to Brigadier, and will be the field commander of all marine operations from this fleet. Caramel from _Hyacinth_ is breveted to Colonel, and is second in command. Both will retain their battalions, and their brevet ranks will only take effect in large deployments."

A fairly blunt way of solving the problem, true, but Mac and Caramel had been the ones whose units had shown the most initiative in the exercise. Giving them brevet, or temporary, ranks was an effective promotion that didn't let them hand off their old units to another. Under the circumstances it had to be the two who could handle the extra workload.

She sat back. "Now, shall we discuss things in more detail?"

Trixie raised a hoof. "I think we should try to get greater coordination between the mage units in the different marine battalions. That 'dragons' teeth' illusion was effective, but it only provided a dozen or so false targets – with more mages feeding it, I think I could have managed to outnumber the real shuttles."

"Good. Perhaps…"

* * *

Ensign Scootaloo looked around at the rest of the Admiral's Table. There was an interesting selection of other ponies here, and not only from the _Harmony_.

Her Admiral had only held a few dinners before, most of them fairly small affairs, but with _Harmony_ now entirely ready for space she'd been persuaded to jointly host a larger one with the Captain.

There were three or four fighter pilots, including Spitfire (Brindle's squadron leader) and Rainbow Dash; the head of the engineering department on _Harmony_, Applejack; both the Captain and Executive Officer, the latter of whom was holding two enthusiastic conversations at once; her own superior Fluttershy; Lyra and Scratch from the flag deck; herself; the Admiral of course and her flag lieutenant – who had his own plate, loaded with a mixture of pyroxene, garnet and some sheets of mica; and a rather nervous looking midshipman on his first deployment.

As she reached him, he steeled himself and raised a glass. "Ladies and gentlecolts, Princess Celestia!"

Scoots' mind flashed as she repeated the toast, flexing vestigial muscles in her foreleg to cue her short-range gravity manipulator implant and hold the wine glass. _Okay, we're in the home system and Princess Celestia returned from her visit to Cloudsdale yesterday. That means that she has precedence, and since I'm the second most junior officer-_

She waited until everyone had finished, then raised her own glass. "Ladies and gentlecolts, Princess Luna!"

As she lowered the glass, she saw Twilight nod slightly in approval.

_Right, now all I have to do is avoid making mistakes _during_ the meal._

* * *

The dinner went down well. Twilight's steward, an unprepossessing stallion by the name of Whooves, had laid out a magnificent spread. The wine, meanwhile, was an old vintage provided by Rarity.

As the meal wore on, those around the table gradually relaxed and conversations began to flow.

"…telling you, it's no coincidence!" Dash confided loudly to Lyra. "Every time I do it, all the cameras pointed at me just white out for a couple of seconds!"

"And your theory is that it's too awesome to be on screen."

"Yeah. Once might be chance, but five times in a row?"

Meanwhile, Rarity, Pinkie and Spike had got into a conversation about gabbroic versus eclogitic rocks. They were all enthusiastic, though none of them could really relate to the criteria the others were using. Rarity's focus was on the beauty of the crystals, Pinkie approached it from a commercial standpoint and Spike waxed lyrical about the taste.

The usually quiet Fluttershy was arguing with Applejack about electronic countermeasures and their best uses, the rest of the fighter pilots were discussing their days at flight school and Pinkie was giving encouragement to the young middy.

"Kinda loud, aren't they?" Scratch asked with a grin.

"Music to my ears." Twilight said. It was the sound of a command crew that was comfortable, and she felt she was getting their measure.

"Heh, talking of music, you ever listen to some of my friend Tavi's stuff? Bit stuffy for me, but you seem like the kind of pony who'd like it."

"I'm afraid not, I'll have to give it a go." Twilight replied, then frowned. "Hang on, Tavi?"

"Yeah, well," The unicorn shrugged. "It's my nickname for her, we've been friends for years. Octavia."

"Oh, I hadn't realized!" Twilight said, delighted. "She's my favourite classical composer. I had her _Salute to Spring_ on, when…" she paused, suddenly sad. "When I nearly lost _Bluebell_."

"Oh? Heard about that on the news, but I didn't know you were listening to Tavi's stuff."

"Yes, well, I decided that since we probably weren't actually going to survive the clash we should go out in style." She smiled weakly. "Sounds a bit strange, talking about it now."

"I go in more for electronics myself. Have to admit, though, that cello concerto of hers is quite the piece of work."

"I have noticed you're quick off the mark with the comms, so I suppose the same principle applies." Twilight allowed. "I've been very pleased with your work."

* * *

"Goodness…" Twilight sighed. "I'm glad that Rarity and her executive officer were able to help me with the social side of things. Working up the fleet has been just exhausting."

Spike nodded. "Well, at least now they're doing a lot better than before."

"It's the weapon diversity. Means a lot of time invested getting used to them, but the load out has a lot more potential once the crew are used to it-"

Three rising notes interrupted the Admiral's speculation. Spike hurried over to the console. "Message arrived under Equinox seal. No originator, just three words."

Equinox was the second highest classification in the Commonwealth and Principality, after Solstice. Both were above 'Top Secret', and Twilight happened to know she was one of five people in the entire star system with Solstice.

She leant over, and blanched.

_Case Ribald, Smartypants._

"What does it mean, ma'am?" Spike asked, noticing his Admiral's reaction.

"Case Ribald was the codename of a scenario we gamed out at ONI – an attack on one of our weapons research and development labs in one of the outer star systems. Co-ordinate with the rest of the staff the details of picking up the fighters and the ship's company on relief, we're going to have to leave as soon as possible!"

She levitated a screen in front of her face. "Admiral Sparkle to all Sixth Fleet captains and senior officers." A grid of fifty or so cutie marks appeared before her as her communications officer began acting as relay. "Everyone, we need to get moving as soon as possible. Get downloads on the Eastern Rim out-systems, and I want the hyper engines ready for the Theta band!"

Hyperspace was arranged in "bands" of higher planes, each of which was about the same maximum speed. The groups were separated by walls of energy, each one more powerful than the last, which heavily strained the wings of starships that crossed them. The Theta band of hyperspace was the highest ever visited. Some physicists held it was the highest it was possible to visit – certainly nothing that had ever attempted the Iota wall had made it back to tell the tale.

Most of the marks blinked acknowledgement at once and disappeared. Among the ones that remained unlit were those of Dash and two of her other flying officers. "Break. Fighter wing, all officers. Return To Base, pegasi! We're leaving as soon as we can, don't delay us. Break. Ensign Scootaloo, what's the ETA of the wing?"

The amber pegasus appeared on her screen. "They're mostly running dry fires on some of the mobile beacons in the crown belt. Should be an hour before they're all docked, assuming we sit here to wait for them – if we make way as soon as possible, the last of them will catch up shortly before the edge of the system."

"Thank you. Break. Epona station command." The screen resolved itself into a rearing white horse on a green field. "Epona control, I formally request clearance for full power to engines as soon as possible."

Normally, since drive wedge stress bands could instantly shred anything physical they hit, there was a safety perimeter around important locations like Epona of one full light second. Inside it the activation of the main drive was forbidden except for the small, powerful tugs that towed ships around near the station.

"Authorization?"

"Admiral Sparkle."

The line went dead for a moment, then the emblem of the station became the compass rose of Vice Admiral Blueblood. "What's the problem?"

"I need to depart from the station parking orbit as soon as possible, I don't have time to wait for tugs. We're outside the minimum safety perimeter, but still inside the official one. I'm acting under Equinox authorization, so I'm formally requesting clearance for full power."

"I… see." The duke considered for a moment. "I'll accept it, though of course if you're making this up…"

"Feel free to check in with _Zenith_ flag, I won't even be out of the star system by the time it comes through."

"_Zenith_ flag? You think her-"

"I got assigned to this fleet by _Zenith_ flag in person, and the letter references something she only called me once, in private, back when she met me after my investiture."

"Well, it's not the most normal of signatures, but then neither is aunty. I'll let her know you got the order."

"Thanks, Blueblood. Sparkle out."

* * *

The vice admiral looked at his com screen for a moment, then chuckled. "I have to say, I've not heard _Zenith _flag as a codename in a while. I suppose it makes sense, _Zenith _and _Perilune _are both technically flagships, but… ah, well." He tapped the screen with a hoof. "Hello, comms? Get me a line to the Diarch of the Day."

"At once, sir!" The hasty reply came back, then his screen lit with a sun emblem.

"Just to confirm, aunty, that _was_ you who sent Green Ridge tearing out of here as if her tail was on fire?"

Celestia chuckled. "Yes, but the simile breaks down for her. She's_ actually _set her tail on fire before, did you know? First time I saw a rage-charge in years."

"Remarkable."

* * *

Two fighters wobbled unsteadily towards the bays of _Harmony_ in tandem, almost spun out of control and landed in their bays having flown in backwards at full normal flight speed.

Applejack cantered out to one of them, surveying the bay with astonishment. "Well, ah'll be… not a scratch."

A grey-coated, blonde pegasus fell out of the cockpit. "Nice flyin', Derpy! Who was yer wingmate?"

"Me." She replied simply, disengaging the extra set of neural links and folding away her custom doubled HUD. "Muffin time!"

The orange earth pony stared after her as she headed for the cafeteria. "Don't that beat all…"

* * *

"_Attention everyone!"_ Countess Pie's squeaky voice sounded throughout the dreadnaught. _"Hyper limit in five minutes, hope you all got your luggage 'cause we don't have time to go back for it!"_

Twilight looked over at Fluttershy. "We _did_ manage to get everyone on board, right?"

"Er, yes. All ships report full complement and Derpy's fighters were the last to dock."

"Good."

Silence reigned for the next few minutes, until Dash came through the lift door. "Okay, sorry I'm late. Not used to being on Flag bridge…"

"Not a problem. You might want to take a seat, Miss Drops is about to take us into hyper."

The forward screen lit, and Twilight lost herself in the spectacle of a Hyper translation.

* * *

Each of the eight ships spread invisible lines of force, unfurling out from the sides like vastly oversized pegasus wings. They began to glow a faint red as the hyper generators cycled up, then slowly changed through the entire visible spectrum to a blinding sky blue.

For almost a second, the entire squadron held position, and then one by one they crossed the invisible plane in space that marked the hyper limit and blinked out of the normal universe entirely.

_Harmony_, on account of having to stay back to let Derpy catch up, was the last to jump, and the ship entered the Alpha bands of hyperspace to find the rest of the fleet holding company with her.

_They've come a long way,_ Twilight silently thought, then raised her voice. "All navigators, we are headed to the Palomino system. Please set your courses. We will be travelling in the Theta bands, so be ready for a rough ride. Sparkle out."

* * *

AN:

* * *

Polities and Star Nations.

* * *

The Equestrian Commonwealth and Principality

Almost entirely populated with ungulates, of whom the overwhelming number are one of the three sub-races of pony.

The government is an administrative diarchy ruled over jointly by Celestia and Luna, two immensely powerful Alicorns. An intricate system of etiquette governs the relative positions of primacy of the two, though the average Equestrian citizen will hardly notice. They are sisters and close friends, and have ruled over their nation for thousands of years – though only in the last few hundred has it spread beyond the capital world itself, as the ungulate diaspora has gradually aligned itself with them.

Owing to differences in the preexisting governments of other planets upon incorporation, some areas are referred to as the "Principality" officially (those for which the princesses are technically liege lords, such as the demesne of Cadence), and others are the "Commonwealth" (those where the government is nominally independent, such as Stalliongrad). Despite this, most citizens simply refer to the entire polity as "The Commonwealth".

At least one princess is in residence at all times at Canterlot Palace, with the other often to be found touring the other systems – a duty the two trade off regularly. It is for this reason that Equestria has a far smaller Home Fleet as a proportion of its' total strength than most nations would consider, for the princesses rule their domain in more than one sense. Celestia can literally control the sun, creating flares and prominences capable of destroying an invading fleet, while Luna's range of telekinetic control is so vast that every uninhabited body in the star system is a potential weapon.

The various inborn abilities of its' citizens provide the Commonwealth with a vibrant economy and strong tech base.

The Equestrian navy is fairly generalist, with a broad spread of weapon systems and philosophies. Recent trends are towards a missile-heavy approach, since it is here that technological advantages have the greatest effect.

The army and marines are primarily defensive, with a predominance of static heavy equipment such as railguns and lasers over mobile vehicles, though this is also being re-evaluated in the new technological environment.

* * *

The Gryphon Republic

A republic in the classical sense, the Gryphons have a system of lifelong senators drawn from an upper class and elected officials from these senators. The Republic occasionally participate in exchanges of students with other star nations when relations are cordial – Gilda being among the most recent of these. She was educated at the Shetland Island naval academy alongside a class of pegasus fighter pilots, something that suited her right down to the ground.

The Republic were the original inventors of the "fighter drive", a completely different system to the more conventional drive wedge, and are its enthusiastic proponents. Gryphon Legion fleets tend to consist of a number of pure fighter platforms, the light and fleet carriers, along with much more heavily armoured assault carriers which take the brunt of any missile fire.

On the ground, a Gryphon Legion army will operate using large numbers of small, fast ground-effect vehicles which do not slow their infantry too much. Their forces are almost universally equipped with copper plasma guns, known as "powerguns", and rocket artillery using sophisticated bursting shells laden with sub munitions.

* * *

The Khanate/The Diamond Dogs

The Diamond Dogs are a much less cohesive political unit than the other powers, existing in a kind of constant state of low-level war between factions and with the outside universe. The leader is the Khan, who theoretically has absolute authority, but since between one and five Khans are in existence at the same time this is self-evidently problematic. Most outsiders simply refer to them as the Diamond Dogs, instead of remembering the increasingly complex series of titles used to denote different dynasties.

Their tech level is somewhat lacking compared to other star nations in general, thanks to their lack of common direction, but their preferred weapons are ones that scale especially well when increased in size. A Dog heavy assault brigade is a sight to behold, equipped as it is with multi-kiloton armoured vehicles sporting plasma cannons with bore diameters approaching a metre.

Their navy lacks fighter support, since the Dogs are unable to fly them nearly as well as the winged species, but this is partially compensated for by their gunboat squadrons.

* * *

The Dragons

Very little is known about them.

They occasionally participate in exchange of fosterlings with other powers, notably the Equestrian Commonwealth in recent years – Spike is the most recent, and is receiving an education in the military with Duchess Green Ridge, as her flag lieutenant.

* * *

For David Weber fans and science fiction watchers in general: The technology in this fic is almost but not quite Honorverse. If you spot a deviation, then chances are it's deliberate. Battle Screen is much more like the BOLOverse version thereof than the traditional Honoverse Sidewall, the Wings are not quite Warshawski Sails, Fighters are taken as much from the Stars at War as they are the Honorverse, Equestria has no wormhole network, and so on. Similarly, the Gryphon Legions are a combination of the Khanate of Orion (space forces) and Hammer's Slammers (ground forces).

For those who can't follow all the sci fi terms all that well, don't worry. It took me a while to get all the terms in the Honorverse... like, say, the third reading...  
This is the updated and revised version of the first chapter.

I've also received two pieces of fanart for this fic so far. One, by Zmok on Deviantart, is a future scene with Major Macintosh on the ground. It's on my DA favorites. The other, by TheStarsAbove, is linked on my profile and is a render of an _Alicorn_-class dreadnaught. Very awesome.


	2. Chapter 2

"Thank you all for coming. We're now a day out, so it's time to go over our planned tactics."

The words were in part a formula – only those onboard the _Harmony_ herself were able to actually be present. But dozens of icons sparkled in the holographic tank of the briefing room, indicating that all of the tactical officers, squadron leaders, executive officers and captains were listening and watching.

"First off, here's the system." A F3 class star, the primary of Palomino burned a little hotter than Celestia's sun itself. It was orbited by a pair of gas giants and three smaller, rocky planets.

One of the moons of the closer-in giant blinked. "That's the main bit of real estate we're defending. It's a research station working on applied advanced physics, which means?"

"Weapons." Dash's voice was unusually grim.

"Exactly. We have to assume that whoever's on the way will know that as well, so they'll try to capture or destroy. We've got to prevent that happening until a full fleet arrives with the capability to build a Skywatch station."

Skywatch stations were powerful fixed defences the size of a small city, with the ability to shield a vast area of the planet they orbited and the firepower to match a fairly large fleet. They were also blindingly obvious and took almost a year to build, making the presence in the system of a star nation's forces obvious and tying down the fleet required to defend the construction. All things being equal, many small facilities relied on stealth instead.

The moon swelled until it filled the holotank. "This is Palomino-d IV. It's habitable, with a breathable atmosphere, but only plant-analogues have made it out of the oceans thus far. The research compound itself is climatically altered and administered." Another zoom. "You'll notice that it's at the end of a long river valley running well back into this mountain range. Fluttershy?"

"Ah, yes." The pegasus took over control of the holo. "As you can see, the compound isn't very well protected, but a lot of it is underground which should allow them to resist bombardment by smaller ships, fighters and aircraft. The point defence network is reasonable considering the remoteness of the location… the real risk, though, is that our enemy will just go for a near light speed missile strike, also known as a cee-fractional strike, which would, um…" Twilight discreetly turned up the gain on her tac officer's microphone, "would lead to the complete destruction of the facility, and probably the mountain range."

"Assuming that they attempt to capture. What then?"

"The mountains prevent landing of any particularly large forces, and the areas within line of sight would be just too risky for a transport, so this flat area is the most likely spacehead." A side valley flashed once. "In this case, the enemy attack would be able to travel down the river valley without significant natural obstruction, though it's so far up that the timeframe would be almost an hour for air cavalry and as many as twelve for planetary siege."

Air cavalry was the fastest type of ground units, though they more closely resembled dragoons than the ancient concept of true cavalry. Small detachments of infantry riding in heavily armed assault shuttles, they were able to project power over large distances rapidly and were often used to take points for other forces to hold.

Planetary siege were at the other end of the scale. Massively armed and armoured fighting vehicles principally fielded by the Diamond Dogs, they were often nearly as powerful as a battleship.

"The best choke points are here and here." One of the indicated points was where a ridge had been cut through by the river as it rose, resulting in a pass barely a kilometre across. The other was much wider, but was the confluence of three rivers from fairly large drainages the other side of the mountains. "The latter has only a few fording points, forcing the enemy to either bunch, abandon their heavy armour or use air transport."

"Thank you. Any comments, marines?"

"How'd our own AA gear stack up against orbital fire? I heard what you're saying about cee-fractionals, and I don't want to be on the receiving end of that."

Fluttershy relaxed slightly, which still left her appearing thoroughly nervous. "Okay, that's different. Precision targeted orbital fire has to be fired from nearby, so it'll still be accelerating, and it's so high angle you'd have all the tracking time you want. Actually, ground based energy weapons can be a lot more powerful than space based ones because of cooling and weight considerations, so it'd be the ships in trouble."

"Nevertheless, it does mean we will have to finish off their fleet or drive it away from the planet before the ground battle is over, or they might just bombard the moon anyway." Twilight added. "Anyone else?"

Silence.

"Right. Now, the space side of things will involve a few new toys that we haven't introduced yet. The first is – Colonel Dash, I don't know if you noticed that the squadron tactical control nets are much larger than needed?"

"Yeah, actually. Twelve ships per squadron, but about fifty extra slots."

"That's because the research division managed to get a deception-mode Electronic Counter Measure emitter small enough to fit in a missile. There are four revolver magazines assigned to them on each fighter, and six rounds per magazine, so you'll be going in with a cloud of decoy targets to add to the real ones. They don't last all that long, but we have a lot of spares."

"Neat." Dash said, already thinking.

"Second, the same line of research led to the dragon's tooth emitter head on a standard missile. Faking an entire shoal of missiles is even more of a strain on the emitters, even the bigger ones that can be put in these missiles, but they'll last long enough to make it through the interception zone. The third one's the Electronic Warfare platforms I'm sure you noticed. Those are designed to aid missile defence and let us make full use of the off-bore capability – they provide a look-up capability past the drive wedge, and they can each run two ships' worth of both offensive and defensive weapons, without exposing the broadsides."

"Marvellous." Rarity declared. "Only one question, though, why wait until now to tell us? We could have practiced with them."

"Equestria is still an open system, so there's the danger of surveillance. Nobody wanted to advertise these capabilities when there was still the possibility of our not needing them. Actually, since things are heating up with the Gryphons again, the original plan was to deploy them fleet wide at commencement of hostilities. That's a wash, though, since Palomino is such an important location." Twilight explained. "I don't think there's anything else installed that I haven't mentioned, though, and we did practice with the off-bore firing capability. Right, what does the location of Palomino give us?"

"It's not all that far from the hyper limit since it's a gas giant moon." Fluttershy replied. "Fortunately the –d component is large enough to have its' own limit, and that gives us about two light minutes of space to use, assuming they come in on the limit itself. The planet's large enough that it forms an obstacle to line of sight over a substantial area, so we'll need to have ships above and below the ecliptic to not miss them transiting in."

"Thank you. Now, depending on the enemy raiders and their fleet configuration, it might be necessary to..."

* * *

"All hands, brace for crash translation!"

Those few throughout the fleet who had not already done so buckled themselves in, and seconds later the wings of all eight began to shimmer in all the colours of the rainbow.

Crash translations were hard on the crew, but they were also the way of arriving in a system that took the least time since they let the ships carry velocity over the hyper walls, and Twilight had decided that there was no other choice. Since the timeframe was almost completely unknown, Sixth fleet had no way of knowing if it was arriving as timely reinforcements, riding to the rescue… or there only to avenge the dead.

"Theta wall in two!"

The ships remained poised for a moment, as if on the lip of a cliff… then the universe heaved.

All eight pairs of wings blazed white, the normally-slow eddies of hyperspace jerked crazily, and Sixth Fleet shed over half of its' velocity in an instant.

"Eta wall in three!"

The wings barely had time to dim before a second influx of transfer energy flooded them. Twilight felt ill, but swallowed it. She was the Admiral, and she had to-

The ship hit the Zeta wall, and then the Epsilon seconds later.

_The translation gradient must be nearly straight down!_ She marvelled, anything to take her mind off the series of wrenching distortions.

The Delta wall was next, but by this point the walls were weaker and didn't strain her system so much. Shaking her head to clear it, she felt the Gamma wall go past. "Engineering? Everything going fine down there?"

"You betcha! We've got a full charge on the wings, and the engines are tuned up to catch the sump!"

"Thank you, commander." She closed the channel, and looked around her staff. Lt. Lyra was recovering from a near attack of nausea, but the rest of them seemed to have taken it well enough.

"Alpha wall in two… one…"

* * *

At a point in space around thirty million kilometres from the research station on Palomino-d IV, eight brilliant white flashes of light heralded the arrival of the dreadnaughts of Sixth Fleet. Their wings burned with a fierce white light, then swept backwards, and the nearly-stationary ships leapt forward at an enormous acceleration far beyond what they could normally sustain.

The purpose of a crash translation was simple – to build up a high charge on the wings, storing as much of the transit energy as possible, rather than let it bleed away as normal. Thus stored, the energy could be used to briefly deepen the inertial sump of the ship's drive and allow it to hit vast accelerations, making up much of the speed drop from the translation itself.

* * *

"Surge is dropping… and power curves have levelled out. We're at 15,000 KPS, turning to decelerate."

Rarity nodded. "Thank you, Miss Drops. Engineering. AJ, how are things looking?"

"Well, that surge probably took a thousand hours off the life of the wing power busses right there, but everythin's looking fine." The cheerful voice replied.

"Thank you, bridge out. Okay, comms. Check the status of the rest of the ships, if you would be so kind. Tactical, anything else in system?"

"No, captain. No enemy ships or debris sighted."

Twilight sighed in relief. "We arrived in time, then. Step down to normal full power, please."

The drives of almost all ships that travelled space used "wedges" of focused gravity, into which they 'dumped' their inertia so as to accelerate at high g factors without crushing the occupants into paste. The crash translation used the energy of hyperspace to dump additional inertia, but under normal circumstances maximum acceleration was limited to the power of the drive wedge. This was further reduced to 80% of normal acceleration except in emergencies, since an overstrained inertial compensator tended to fail more spectacularly than one under a lesser power load.

One side benefit of the wedge – and the reason it was the pre-eminent drive system – was that the wedges were utterly impenetrable by any weapon in known space. The shields provided were used as, perhaps, a riot shield would be – an analogy only hampered by the way that acceleration had to be perpendicular to both wedges.

* * *

"The station's hailing us."

"Well, at least they're prompt." Rarity said lightly. They were barely three minutes into the system.

"Actually, captain, I'll take this." Twilight interjected. "I'm the sort of person they expect to see knowing about this place."

"Oh, of course, darling." She replied, handing the exchange off to the flag deck.

* * *

"…name and purpose, unknown ships." The challenge concluded. Twilight noted that it had been done voice only, probably to prevent it being immediately apparent that this was an Equestrian installation.

"Scratch, full video please. Palomino, this is Admiral Twilight Sparkle aboard TMS _Harmony_, Sixth fleet command. We have intelligence that a raid or attack on this system may be imminent, and we're here to mind the shop until a proper reinforcement echelon can arrive. Sorry, Palomino groundside, but it looks like your isolation has come to an end. Sixth fleet out."

Twilight glanced over at her comms officer. "On the chip, ma'am." The unicorn took an extra moment to play it back through her headphones. "Clean recording."

"Good. Send it."

"Away."

Four minutes ticked past, and Sixth Fleet fell over three and a half million kilometres towards the planet, before a reply came back. This time, instead of a simple message, a live video feed appeared. The speaker was a fairly large male unicorn.

"Can't say that's good news, but it's nice of you to come and join us if things are going to get rough. I make your ETA about one point five hours from now, so if there's nothing else..?"

"Actually, I'm afraid there is. I'm going to need more complete geophysical information on the local terrain and a tac summary of the installation, so my staff can get working. I'm afraid the ONI files were last updated several months ago."

Four more minutes passed. It was an unfortunate fact of light speed communication that this sort of thing happened – etiquette stated that switching to a wallpaper image was only permissible if the delay was five minutes or so each way.

"Understood. I'll get some of the techs compiling what we have geophysics wise, but I can tell you now that the only change in the last year was an extra point defence station. That was three months ago, and it puts up our laser clusters to fifty and gives us a total of twenty five countermissile links, though we don't have all that many missiles for them."

"Thank you, that's helpful information nonetheless. Sixth Fleet out."

Twilight waited until the transmit light blinked out, before stamping her hooves on the deck twice in quick succession. "Alright, people! Now we know their point defence situation, we can get some idea on the survivability of the installation against air or artillery strikes, like from a Dog heavy – or for that matter a Gryphon armoured cavalry brigade. What kind of commitment would we need to make from shipboard resources to strengthen for that?"

Dash frowned. "Given how good the _Auroras_ are, I'd say that a gryphon brigade wouldn't last all that long. The air mobile portion, anyway, if we get gun packs. Resisting their AA might be harder, though, especially as keeping up shields in atmosphere kills manoeuvrability. I'll get to it."

"Do so. If necessary, we can of course deploy fighters after using them in a space action. Coordinate with Mac and Trixie."

* * *

"O-kay, left a touch… there!" Applejack checked her eyeballed placement with a minicomputer, and found it to be accurate. "Now, power 'em up, by pairs."

Two by two, fourteen small devices placed around the perimeter of the installation spun to life. An azure corona built around each one, and then a brilliant blue dome formed just outside the line they established.

"And there you have it. Battle screen online." She kicked a foreleg at the dome. "Kind of a power hog, and won't take anything too heavy like a cee-fractional, but should give you extra time agin any air-cavalry that comes in. Those have to use light weapons. Hell, with them point defence towers you'd come out the better in a fight like that."

"And how would they take ground-based fire?"

"Against a medium mech… they'd probably give you time to hide. The kinda plasma cannon that can be mounted on a mech would get deflected, but the generators would likely explode so you'd only block the one shot."

"That's cheery."

"Better than nothing, now, ain't it?" Applejack asked. "And 'sides, if they can't punch you out by going over the top, they have to fight through the marines, and my brother won't let you down. You can have my word on that."

* * *

Twenty kilometres away, at the river choke point – the closer of the two – Mac nodded to himself as the hasty defences went up. The Marine brigade, between their eight battalions, had enough in the way of prefabricated emplacements to build a fairly strong cork in the bottle.

They weren't going to defend the second position, the gorge. That was too far from the installation, in his opinion, though depending on whom the enemy actually turned out to be there were plans to whittle them down there, either by bombing from the assault shuttles or by using air mobile forces in those same shuttles to pick off the enemy as they emerged.

It was a good thing the mountains came so close to the gorge, though, or it would be a death sentence for the shuttles.

"Brigadier."

He turned, spotting a blue unicorn walking over to him.

"Eeeeyup?"

Trixie rolled her eyes. "Oh, don't start that again. And as I was going to say, there are a few areas around here which would turn thixotropic in case of a heavy mech moving through. I was going to detail my earth specialists to expand them and see if I can get a properly marshy area. Does that help your projections?"

The big stallion looked down at his map and tapped it with a hoof, speaking in a slow drawl. "If there's only one clear path, it'll make them bunch up more and move slower than if we just block it off completely. Would this mix you're talking about support the weight of a tank?"

"You mean like a Gryphon Panzer, or a Dog light mech? No, they have too much ground pressure. Combat cars would be able to get over with their fans on full, and Dog APCs are amphibious anyway, but it would block anything heavier that wouldn't just treat the whole river as a ford."

"Then go ahead, Captain."

Trixie nodded in salute, and trotted off a little way. A quick application of telekinesis drew her staff and placed it on the ground, and an almost subsonic sound thrummed out from the point of contact.

A moment later, she raised it again, snapping her communicator out of a pouch on her combat webbing. "Okay. 2/1st, I need you down at the ford."

An affirmative reply came back, and she set off at a ground-eating canter. A dataslate floated in her upper field of vision, the areas needing attention being highlighted one by one as _Harmony_'s main computer collated the results of her seismic scan.

* * *

"_Stellar_ and _Brindle_ are under emissions control over the north pole of Palomino-d, covering most of the system. So long as at least one of the other ships is south of Palomino-d IV's equator, there isn't anywhere it's possible to transit in without being noticed."

"So that's the setup. What about the plan for when our unwelcome guests come?" Dash asked. "I don't like the idea of a third of our total fighter strength being out on a limb like that."

"Their ECM suites should allow them to remain in stealth under low power against any navy's sensor systems. Their captains are under orders to remain in company and attempt to work around the back of any guests, and to be ready for full double barrage and crash launch at the most opportune time. While I appreciate that your survivability is going to be lower without the fifth and sixth squadrons, the decoy missiles should help. Oh, and I want attacks to be coordinated with the fleet where possible – the more of their point defence is shooting down missiles, the less can be aimed at _you_, and we can put out a hell of a missile barrage. And one more thing, you are explicitly warned _not_ to go out chasing lightly defended transports, we want them to commit to a landing so we don't have a cee-fractional strike hanging over the heads of the marines."

"Point taken. Eesh." Dash muttered. "So, what load out should we have as default?"

"I'm assuming that there's a risk of the enemy having small craft. I'd say start out with gun packs and light missiles, and if it's something like, oh, a Gryphon formation with no carriers-"

The Colonel snorted. "Like _that'll_ ever happen."

"Then we'll rearm the fighters at that time. I still want the internal launchers to have antiship missiles, though, they're too generally useful and loading light missiles into them would be a waste of space."

"Good point. And what about decoys?"

"Full load. Don't replenish them on any given pass, since seeing a source separate from another will tell the point defence computers which two sources must correspond to one fighter, but do it between passes."

"Huh, yeah, guess you're right there too. I have to admit, Admiral, you've really thought this through. I was worried that you were a missile-deck admiral or an intel specialist who wasn't used to the real world, but, well."

Twilight smiled. "It's partly Storm Wing's doing. He and I gamed out some of the implications of this new technology, and he always insisted that a given round of tests be done with a single fleet that couldn't replenish itself. Some of the other test admirals went for full-bore, accept-any-losses attacks, and that usually worked for about three missions until they ran out of fighters – or capital ships."

"Well, you're okay in my book." Dash raised a hoof, and after a moment Twilight copied her and touched them together.

"Good. I'd hate to be, well, bad in your book, if that makes any sense."

* * *

"Thank you for going to all this trouble." Fluttershy mumbled, looking into a deep hole in the ground halfway along the narrow riverbed of the gorge.

The engineer she was talking to, one of the Apple clan by the name of Braeburn, shrugged. "Well, this makes sense to me, so I can't see any reason why not. Okay, what channel do you want it set to?"

"Four-oh-one, please." The pegasus said, and inserted a dataslate into the large device hanging from a pinnace overhead.

The engineer tapped a few controls, then nodded in satisfaction. "Done. You going to be controlling this yourself?"

"No, I'd be much too far away, and probably out of line of sight anyway. I'm going to give this to, er, Caramel. Would you mind giving me a lift?"

"Sure thing., just give me a sec." Braeburn turned his attention to the pinnace. "Okay, down another two feet… aaand done. Tractors on, shed about fifty cubic metres from the bottom of the pile into the hole, another two hundred into the river, then lower it back down and I'll seal it."

The pinnace complied, quickly burying the device, and Braeburn walked slowly around the perimeter of the displaced section of soil. Where he'd walked, the gap was covered by mud, and a scattering of rocks kicked over it created the illusion that nothing had been done there.

"You sure this is gonna be undetectable, commander?"

"Ah-er-yes. It can spoof radar returns and the like, and there's very little actual power leakage outside the shell. It's why I picked an area with quartz veins, so what little there is will be written off as piezoelectricity if they bother to scan at all."

"You think they might not?"

"Well, it does depend on who we're waiting for… Anyway, that lift?"

Braeburn waved the pinnace down to land next to them. "Certainly. You never got the hang of the whole 'high rankin' officer' thing, ma'am?"

"It just seems impolite to order. It's why I could never be a proper commander…"

"Naw, don't talk like that. Nothing wrong with being considerate."

* * *

"Hyper footprint!"

Pinkie was instantly alert. "General Quarters! Heading and strength?"

The ACTO of the ship looked over his board as the flares came in, ignoring the strident GQ alarm. "Sixteen… no, eighteen point sources, ma'am. It's at 120 to the moon-planet heading, inclination 35."

Tactical's holotank lit up, indicating the sources by strength. "CIC makes it ten in the dreadnaught size range, six escorts and two that could be either transports or _really_ big carriers. No crash translation."

"Okay, so we have a few hours to play with. Ships that big are going to accelerate really, really slowly. Let the eggheads know about the guests – oh, and warn the marines that the party starts soon."

The screen on the watch chair arm lit, revealing Twilight with her mane and tail mussed. It was ship "night", and by the looks of things the Admiral had been keeping to the schedule.

"What can you tell me?"

"Not all that much, we're only getting light speed information now. They transited about half a light minute from the planetary limit, so their information must be patchy."

"Pity it's not more patchy. It would have been entertaining to see them try to come in inside the limit of a planet they didn't know about." The consequence of such a mistake was a destructive strain on the emitters – or, if the error was more than a third the radius of the hyper limit, spectacularly fatal.

Twilight shook off the mood. "Okay, sorry. Still a bit groggy." The sounds of several ponies at a swift canter echoed down the link, and Twilight's face in the screen turned to the flag bridge as a whole. "Fluttershy, good morning. What's their ETA?"

The yellow pegasus' eyes flashed, trying to take in the information flooding at her. "Ah, hang on… okay, if they stay in company with the larger ships and go for a zero distance/zero relative velocity, three hours two minutes. If they try a least time with the larger ships, two hours nine minutes. Assuming they use only their capital ships and faster, the numbers become two hours nine and one hour thirty-one."

"Right… what polity? Anything?"

"Uh, _Reprise_ CIC has a tentative ID on the dreadnaughts. Diamond Dog _Mastiffs_."

Most of the bridge crew breathed a sigh of some relief. Dogs were tough fighters and tenacious as hell, but they weren't a flying species, and they were too big to make use of the fighter effect – especially since it practically required flight experience to fly one well.

Twilight, however, frowned. "Open me a channel to the Combat Information Centre. CIC, I want an ID on those larger ships. Do either of them match the _Kennel_-class? And Lt. Lyra. Analysis on probable intentions – smash or grab?"

Lyra replied first. "Dogs are aware of their inferiority in space combat tech, and especially in miniaturization. They'll want to capture the installation if at all possible, and their ground formations are so heavy I imagine they'll think it possible until the last medium mech goes down. The good news is that apart from their mechs, they don't have much punch – their infantry weapons are one of the things their miniaturization hurts, and the average battle harness should equal or exceed them."

"Okay. Any sign of separating vectors?"

"Ah, yes. One of the freighters is moving in company with their screen and a pair of DNs on a vector towards the planet, the other is sitting where it is… and the remaining DNs are getting underway now. The second one… yes, _Pinion_ confirmed it first. It's a _Kennel._" The _Kennel_ class were gunboat tenders, freighters built like larger versions of a standard carrier and with no weapons or defences. This was possible due to the greater operational range of their gunboats – the delicate equipment of a fighter needed regular overhaul in a hanger bay.

"My compliments to their CIC. Fluttershy, I want a running update on the last moment their _Kennel_ could launch gunboats to be in company with their main DNs when they meet us. Least-time and zero-zero on the DNs. Miss Rarity," and Twilight turned back to her link to her flagship's bridge, "Take us out to meet our guests. Half of normal power, vector a little to the south so that we can tell if one of them is headed for the planet. Overpower the wedges so we look like transports. And send a whisker laser to third division, to attempt to manoeuvre so as to get the enemy between us, text only, no acknowledgement required."

"Understood, Admiral." Rarity replied.

"Dash, I'm going to hold you back until you can launch to take out the gunboats, but be ready to go – things could change quickly."

"You got it. Nice prediction with the fighter packs, too." Dash left for her squadron's ready room, having barely had time to sit down.

"Scootaloo, please liaise with the hanger crews and make sure they're ready for either a maximum-speed reload of the gun packs and light missiles, or a switch to heavy antiship loads. Time will be of the essence."

"Aye, Admiral."

"And now…" she paused, sniffed, and winced. "I think I'm going to take a shower."

The ripple of laughter that met that comment broke the remaining tension. Spike nodded sagely to himself. "See, this is one of the advantages of being a reptile."

* * *

Forty minutes later, the range had fallen to forty-three point three million kilometres. The ships had completed the change to General Quarters some time before, and both DN battlegroups were slowly generating separation from the somewhat-hyperbolic path the mixed Dog force was on.

Fluttershy suddenly startled. "Status change! Gunboats have launched from the _Kennel_, estimate forty-plus! Distance to carrier is currently fifty-one point nine million kilometres!"

"Time to us?"

"Under current acceleration – they're making 6 KPS squared – they'll get to us in fifty four minutes, thirty seconds. Zero-zero, they'll take one hour, thirty four minutes with turnover in half an hour.

"And if we go to full normal power?"

"Fifty minutes to least-time, one hour forty-seven for zero-zero."

"Right. What about if they hold company with their own DNs instead?"

"Fifty-four minutes to pass, one hour eight to match velocity and intercept. And before you ask, if we both go for a least time then the DN forces will interpenetrate after about forty minutes, and one of them can catch the other under any circumstances if it turns to run. Cooperating on a zero-zero, that's turnover in twenty minutes and match at one hour ten."

"I don't think they have us properly identified, yet..." Twilight muttered. "Good." She turned to the flag bridge link. "My compliments to you, Captain, and increase speed to full normal power."

"Full normal power. Thank you, Admiral." The unicorn replied.

"Er, their gunboats can still reach us before we catch the enemy dreadnaughts, if they turn away…"

"Yes, but only if they hold to maximum power profile, and it'll be by barely ten minutes. Besides, we're a missile-heavy fleet. Time to missile range?"

"Ah, currently… thirty six minutes." The holotank added powered missile ranges for full and half-power missiles. "At that point, we launch from beyond maximum range but the relative motion brings us in closer."

For the next five minutes, the three forces moved together in the plot. Then another vector changed.

"The enemy DNs have reversed heading. They don't appear to have any additional acceleration, so it looks like they're just holding the range open as long as possible."

"Thank you. Revised estimates?"

"New time to missile range, forty six minutes. The gunboats will reach us in forty-five. Oh, and it looks like the count has firmed up – there's forty eight of them"

"So, they're not as bad as we'd hoped. Well, there's a solution for that. Line to the flight deck."

Dash appeared on the screen. "What's up?"

"Fluttershy, copy the tactical data across. Colonel, I need your fighters to rid us of the gunboats. It doesn't matter if you get them all, just force them off their least-time course if you can't do that."

"Against _Dogs?_ Admiral, if I can't take them out with one wing behind my back I don't deserve my rank!" Dash grinned, flaring her wings for emphasis.

"Just doing it will be fine, Colonel. And make sure to deploy the decoy missiles properly, gunboats do mount point defence and it can be used in anti-fighter mode. Fighter cover is their tactical purpose."

"Yeah, but they're crap at it. Okay, Admiral, I'll keep them off your back. Dash out."

* * *

AN

* * *

Order of Battle:

Equestrian Sixth Fleet

Alicorn DN (Missile ship refit): Reprise, Cavalcade

48 missile tubes per broadside (off bore capability)  
Athena platforms (as Keyhole 1, with point defence)  
Heavy energy chase armament (Xasers)  
Medium energy broadside armament (Xasers)  
60 countermissile tubes per broadside  
60 laser clusters per broadside

Alicorn DN (CV refit): Harmony, Hyacinth, Pinion, Mystery, Stellar, Brindle

24 missile tubes per broadside (off bore capability)  
Athena platforms  
Heavy energy chase armament  
No broadside energy armament  
Heavy shields in broadside  
6 fighter bays per broadside  
60 countermissile tubes per broadside  
60 laser clusters per broadside

Athena platforms mount 20 point defence and 10 countermissiles each, and have a total of 160 fire control links for each type of missile - thus, a single Athena platform can coordinate two entire ships' worth of countermissiles.

Aurora fighter  
Multirole  
Size around 30m length  
External hardpoints: four. External pods include gun packs, small or large missiles, lasers, cloak ECM, scanners, life support extension.  
6 decoy missile launchers, 6 rounds per launcher in "revolver".  
4 internal missile launchers.  
2 Internal lasers.  
Internal fire-confusion ECM

Small missiles are 5mt nuclear warheads, large ones are 100mt laser heads and intended to be used on capital ships.

Diamond Dog strike fleet

Diamond Dog dreadnaught  
Reporting name Mastiff-class  
24 missile launchers, 30 grasers in each broadside.  
Countermissiles 40, laser clusters 45

Diamond Dog gunboat tender  
Reporting name Kennel-class  
Large transport-sized, maximum acceleration 1.5 KPS squared.

Diamond Dog gunboat

Reporting name Russel-class (rarely used)

Max acceleration 6 KPS squared (uses Drive Wedge)

Crew 8

Six laser clusters, four countermissile tubes per broadside. One spinal heavy graser, two capital missile tubes.

Diamond Dog light cruiser  
Reporting name Hound-class  
8 missile launchers (less capable missiles than Mastiffs), 10 grasers per broadside.  
Point defence: countermissiles 12, laser clusters 16

Diamond Dog assault transport  
Reporting name Bulldog-class  
Capacity: one heavy assault brigade

Heavy assault brigade

Five mech battalions  
Each one Shitzu, two Akita

Three light battalions  
Each four Schnauzer, ten APC (each with ten soldiers)

Air cavalry battalion  
48 heavy lift shuttles (each with ten soldiers)

(Names given for Diamond Dog ships and mechs are the Equestrian reporting names, not the Diamond Dog's own terms.)


	3. Chapter 3

Rainbow Dash flew up to the cockpit of her fighter (since all fighter jocks were pegasi, the technicians hadn't bothered installing a ladder), entered and strapped herself in. "Okay, how's it looking?"

One of the fighter technicians, a Petty Officer, nodded at her. "Clear, ma'am. Neural links… online. We set up the armament mix half an hour ago at least, so you should be go to launch any time."

"Understood. Clear the hanger, PO, I'm heading out."

As the fighter bay party left and the blast door sealed, she settled deeper into the link and felt the fighter come alive. "Okay, everyone. Ready?"

Ten green lights blinked on the HUD.

"Launch!"

Tractors in the bay caught the fighter and flung it out into space, aiming for the point the narrowing after aspect of the drive wedge would intersect as it closed to minimum thickness. A few seconds later, the fighter was clear and its' own drive activated.

"Everyone still here?"

Markers appeared on her screen, and the four squadrons of the attack moved around at low accelerations for a few seconds getting into formation.

Scootaloo's voice came over. "Clear decks, Colonel! I'm assigning you the current course now!"

"You got it. Nice work. Let me know if there's a change, alright?" She switched to the squadron main channel. "Okay, there's one of them for every one of us, and spares for the best. Pick your targets, get the decoys in position on the way, and stay alive. Dash out."

* * *

Twilight checked the time. "Twenty minutes to go. I think it's time to deploy the Athena platforms, get their system check cycle done. Captain?"

"Understood. Sixth fleet, order from the flag. Deploy Athena platforms."

* * *

Recessed shapes on both sides of each dreadnaught detached, snapping out and past the drive wedge on tractor tethers. Beamed power from an emitter in each bay woke them and began their systems test, activating powerful sensors, scanners and electronic warfare systems.

* * *

"Hey, Twilight!" the exec's voice suddenly interjected, "The platforms just let CIC down here get a good look at that mixed force. Their dreadnaughts are actually modified to have the same signature as _Mastiffs_, but they're really _Pitbull_-class. The others that are coming to meet us have the same ID as we originally gave them."

"That could be a problem." Twilight muttered. "_Pitbulls_ are escorts - much more energy weapon rich, plasma guns and that sort of thing. Though I have to admit, with how much we've deleted energy armament on these _Alicorns_ they could have been a sticky enemy. So it's probably better they went with that group. How did you manage to see through it?"

"Oh, one of the ponies down here used to be an astronomer. So he used the platforms as a single large optical telescope! Their hulls have more energy ports and no missile ports, and their point defence clusters are visible at this resolution!"

Rarity came back into the conversation. "Good work that pony, then. Do commend him, Pinkie."

"Of course! Uh, CIC out."

"Captain, are we still in range for com laser to the planet?"

"Unfortunately not, Admiral. It'll have to be radio. And I doubt that it would tell them much in any case."

"Point well made, Captain. A thought occurs, however. Engineering. Commander, how much energy weapon fire could your battle screen stand up to?"

"Hum, well, it's able to take ground-based plasma fire well enough… for a moment, anyway… I'd say that given the scales of the fleets we're talkin' about, it could take their bombardment for long enough to get everyone underground. Atmosphere's a great help in degradin' laser and plasma fire, too. And that kind of deep buried installation kin rely on the shielding rock… yeah, the installation can take that kind of bombardment as a whole for long enough. Good thing they won't have long holding the orbitals before we get back, though."

"True. I make it about thirty minutes to turnover, with that transport."

* * *

Scootaloo raised her voice. "Admiral, the fighters are going in."

"Thank you, Ensign." She replied formally, zooming the plot in on the engagement. Apart from the drives, all the information they were going to get was several seconds old – and the fighters and decoy missiles looked identical even to sensors that knew what to look for at this range.

But to do anything else would be disrespectful.

* * *

"Okay, thirty seconds! Everyone, remember – Derpy, what the hell are you doing!"

The grey mare's two fighters had gone to full dogfighting power early, pushing her out ahead of the rest of the fighters. They were attended only by ten decoy missiles, and against the fire of four full gunboat flotillas the conclusion was almost foregone.

Then the fighters fired their ship-killer missiles and snapped around in a sharp skew turn port, taking them out of the same vector as the countermissiles streaking to kill her and distracting the pilots of the gunboats. To be fair to the gunboat pilots it wasn't as if the big shipkillers were manoeuvrable enough to hit them-

Then they detonated. Two by two, the eight enormously powerful warheads, designed to damage dreadnaughts, exploded – and their gravity lenses that normally focused the blast into their lasing rods were _offline_. They built a wall in space of threshing, blinding radiation, sending the main countermissile swarm haywire.

And Dash understood. Derpy had got them through the interception zone. She'd gone in alone ahead to find what the Dog gunboat computers considered "hard lock" range, then timed the missiles to fry their countermissile launch.

"Nice work, Derpy! Just, let us know next time, okay?" The short wing passed through the expanding bubbles of plasma left by the explosions, and salvoed their own missiles at what for interstellar combat was knife range – and then the gun packs began firing, and there was no time for thought.

* * *

The first, flashing, high speed pass was over. Dash swung her fighter into a turn, vision greying as her drive rode the edge of its' performance curve. "Sound off!"

Soarin' replied first. "My squadron has eleven effectives and one loss, lifepod is signalling and trajectory recorded. Lt. Echo should be fine, those pods have about two days' supplies."

"Acknowledged, Major. How did your decoys do?"

"We took about fifteen losses among them." He sounded disgruntled.

"Looks like they were a good plan after all. What about Third, Surprise?"

"No casualties!" The white pegasus replied jubilantly. "Though I have _such_ a big dent on my port side, and that laser's packed in. I think it must have been a point defence laser that got through the battle screen at a glancing angle. Oh, and we lost only a couple of decoys."

"Good to hear. Fourth?"

"One KIA. Bluebird. My computer says a pair of countermissiles took his shield and his fighter out too close together to eject. I've also got one lifepod beacon, that's Sparrow."

"Ouch, that's rough. I was hoping we'd have no fatalities." She checked her own indicators – there were ten fighters left in the squadron, one lifepod, but no red icons for KIA. "For my part, Minty's shot-out and… we apparently lost another fighter?"

"My bad." Derpy said. "I lost all my decoys, the countermissiles that were after me had locked on. And I lost _Muffin Too_ as well."

"That's your second? Okay, at least it wasn't piloted." Dash punched a few commands into the computer, and with something that felt like itching feathers her decoy missiles replenished themselves. "Right, shake back into formation. We're going back in. Everyone arm your shipkillers."

"They won't fall for it twice." Derpy said sadly. "Not that close together."

"Did I say anything about doing it that way? Oh, Derps, that reminds me. Can you manage a double load of decoy missiles and still fight?"

"Just about, if I concentrate. What do you want me to do? I haven't got any ship killers left."

"You're going to use your gun packs and standard missiles to take snapshots, and ram them with any decoy missiles of yours that happen to be close enough when their shields go down." Dash continued reorganizing her somewhat reduced fighter wing, sorting out the mess created by jammers and what EMP got past the particle shields. "Looks like they have about fifteen gunboats left. Everyone else get that?"

Acknowledgements came from three or four other ships. "Right. I'm marking areas of responsibility, the overlap is deliberate. I want these bastards too busy shooting down shipkillers set to proximity fuse to have the time to go after us. And then it's a dogfight with lasers. Surprise, hang back, you've only got half your close in armament functioning."

* * *

For a tiny moment, the squadron hung motionless relative to the planet, with the gunboats speeding away from them at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Then their immensely powerful drives accelerated them into the planetary system again, for a second attack.

* * *

"I'm reading around sixty-nine percent casualties among the gunboats, and two more leaking air. Fighters are down to forty three, with one KIA, one unmanned loss and three shot-out."

Twilight exhaled. "I'd been fearing worse. Those gunboats are brutal in a head-on intercept."

"True, but the decoy missiles worked wonders. Dash is coming in for a second attack with her internal weapons."

"I want to call her off, but I can't justify it. We really do need to make sure those things don't jump us in the middle of a missile exchange." Twilight said aloud. "Captain. As soon as the missile engagement is about to start I want a hard skew turn to port, and hold maximum military power to generate side vector. We do _not_ want to interpenetrate with those dreadnaughts. And as soon as we reveal our sheer weight of broadside, they're going to be attempting to generate an energy engagement as soon as they can – so that turn is subject to change to keep the wedge stress bands interposed."

"Understood, Admiral." Rarity looked away from the link, and began relaying the order.

"CIC. How good are the locks you have now?"

"We've got them pretty much dialled in! If they start up any EW systems of their own it'll be a bit more dicey, but the Athena platforms are a real help! They let us make visual identification of the targets." The Countess' cheery voice replied.

"Fluttershy. How many salvoes will we have?"

"Ah, cycle time is fifteen seconds, so… twenty-one, counting the ones after we pass. But we don't have that many missiles in the magazines of the pure missile ships."

"CIC. How many point defence stations per enemy ship?"

"Ah… eighty-five! But not all of them can bear in any given firing arc, so we're looking at more like fifty or so if they open their broadsides. Call it half countermissile, half point defence. Oh, and they have thirty or so grasers that can be used in an emergency."

"Thank you. Fluttershy, missile transit time across the engagement envelopes?"

"Ah… first salvoes about eighteen seconds for the countermissile envelope, so two or three launches. And the energy weapons will each get one shot. That length of time will increase as we get closer, because the drives will have less time to build up their speed, but they'll also have more manoeuvre time on the drives so the hit probabilities go up. And then the second half of the salvoes we can use full power and still have drive time, so the interception time is shorter again."

"So their entire fleet's point defence can stop something like three times our maximum density. But that's assuming they're all in range. Factor in intership spacing, what's the most vulnerable ship – that is, which one could we get _most_ missiles through their defences?"

Fluttershy typed away for a minute, and the plot zoomed in on the Dog battlegroup. Their icons were beginning to haze as they brought up their own EW systems, but their positions were still known by visual identification.

A red icon careted one of the DNs. "This one. It's only in range to be supported by three of the others."

"Assume we get a big piece of it. What after that?"

A second caret appeared.

"Continue."

One by one, the ten ships were designated in order.

"Right. I want one salvo per target, in that order. After that, aim for what's left – assess each ship's relative survival as we move on to the next."

"O-okay. Ah, what about electronic warfare missiles?"

"Each salvo to be one-sixth or less electronic warfare. Work out your fire plan for them with the ship tac officers."

* * *

"Missile range in two minutes." Fluttershy said absently, finalizing her fire plan.

"Battle screen up, roll fleet." Twilight replied. "Captain, I have little more to do in this engagement. I leave us in your capable grasp."

"Aye, Admiral."

The link between the bridges went into standby, and Twilight's horn glowed. The crew were in skintight space suits as per GQ procedure, but all skinsuits made provision for their owners' biology – indeed, Spike's let him breathe fire through a permeable forcefield – and as a consequence the light of her magic was visible.

She barely heard Scootaloo excitedly reporting that the fighters had finished off the gunboats for no further losses, or Lt. Commmander Scratch asking what she was doing.

As for what, it was simple. She was attempting another of those feats of magic that had earned her the Golden Horn she preferred to forget about.

She was holding the armour of the _Harmony_ in place relative to itself.

While a warship's armour was easily capable of enduring massively destructive attacks, at least partly because it was made of magically produced, molecularly perfect crystals and metals, the kind of energy involved in a missile duel – or an energy weapons firing pass – was so monumental that it could shatter that armour. No fusing or melting with that kind of energy. And the splinters that resulted often did hideous damage to the insides of the ship, for all that it was better than letting the energy get to them directly.

The structural members of the ship lit with a shimmering indigo witchfire, startling Applejack and her engineering work parties as they made ready for damage control. It made Rarity frown, before she recognized it for what it was. It made Pinkie giggle, as the ship now matched its' fleet flag icon. And it still made Twilight ache, for she couldn't do it to her entire squadron.

* * *

"What are the ponies doing?"

The tac officer didn't reply. He didn't have anything to answer with, after all.

Rover tapped his claws on the deck irritably. "They should be turning to present their broadsides, not the roofs of their drive wedges! Have they decided to play the chicken after all?"

"All their manoeuvres so far indicate an aggressive commander, sir. They won't back down now."

"If they were Dogs, maybe not. But they're ponies. They might see it as a worthwhile trade to bluff us into changing vector like we have, then recover their fighters, relaunch and send them to help with the defence of that moon."

He chuckled harshly. "Besides. Those hybrid carriers can't have nearly as heavy a broadside as we do. Maybe even they have finally noticed!"

"Captain, I'm picking up targeting emissions. One minute to extreme missile range."

"Signal the fleet. Present broadsides!" Rover rapped out. As senior captain, he was in command – Dogs had fewer flag officer ranks, tending to rely on their post captains. It was part of their pack nature.

The ships slowly swung in space, generating side vector parallel to the Equestrian fleet.

"Broadsides ready, sir. All ships report cleared, and- _martyred avatars!_"

* * *

Fluttershy depressed her firing key as the 'ballistic time' estimate on her console fell to zero.

It had been the energy weapons that had been removed from the hybrid carriers to free up fighter deck space, so both broadsides still carried their original complement of twenty-four missile launchers. Reprise and Cavalcade, however, had lost some of their energy armament and had the missiles in place compressed to the new "six-cell" arrangement, taking up far less broadside space. Which had allowed the engineers to fit in an _extra _twenty-four tubes in each broadside.

Even more important, however, was the more sophisticated new design of those missiles and launchers, allowing them to fire at a radically off-bore angle, and the Athena platforms letting them do so even when the enemy were invisible thanks to the interference of their own wedges.

All six ships opened fire with _both_ broadsides.

Every missile made a right angle turn within the first second of launch, coming around in a great, sweeping arc and racing towards their target.

The ten Dog dreadnaughts had fired two hundred and forty missiles at the Equestrian fleet, concentrating on the lead division; Sixth Fleet replied with _three hundred and eighty-four, _targeted on a single Dog dreadnaught in a precise time on target salvo.

Fifteen seconds later both fleets fired again. And again. By the time the first salvo reached attack range, five more from each fleet were in space and a sixth was launching.

* * *

Sixth Fleet's ships, while not new construction, had been extensively refitted to fit with a primarily missile-based warfare. It was in this field that the recent electronics and hardware advances could be put to the greatest use, and consequently every ship had over a hundred point defence countermissile launchers, and a similar number of laser clusters, studding its' sides. The Athena platforms provided vital telemetry that meant the countermissiles could engage without revealing the ship itself to easy attack, and meant that when the attacking laser heads finally "popped up" past the wedge looking for the ship inside, the laser clusters could already be trained on them.

In spite of this, several missiles from the first salvo made it through the interception zones, enduring successive tithes from the electronic warfare systems, two countermissile launches, and laser clusters. Two of the missiles also impacted harmlessly on the roofs of drive wedges, their small drives barely causing a ripple in the far more powerful ship wedge.

The first hits, focused mainly on _Reprise _and _Cavalcade_, did no actual damage to the hull directly but strained the ability of their battle screen to compensate. One capacitor blew, venting into space and making _Cavalcade_ lurch slightly starboard.

Her captain, Ruby, narrowed her eyes in frustration. But the tactical team were already engaging the second barrage and she didn't want to jog their elbows. Deciding on a compromise, she opened a link to engineering.

"My compliments, Starlet, but could you expedite patching repairing that generator? I feel rather vulnerable without ten percent of our shield strength."

"Tell me something I don't know, captain. The generator's fine – we just need to switch in the extra load to Fusion Two."

The ship's battle screen flared a brilliant white as it vented excess energy, the second salvo having been stopped more successfully. But by now it was clear the Dogs had identified her division as the sources of more than their fair share of missiles.

"Understood. Just get me that generator back up."

* * *

Things were far worse for the attacking force, however.

The Equestrian attack missiles were fundamentally very similar to their Dog counterparts, but the salvo also had a few dozen electronic warfare platforms seeded into it. At carefully choreographed times, some of these missiles engaged deception-mode ECM and the attack birds moved in a complex dance around them, resulting in nearly a hundred new threat sources to assign countermissiles to as they slashed across the interception zone.

Then, as the countermissiles attempted to attain their onboard locks – thus freeing up control links for an additional launch of countermissiles – the rest of the electronic warfare missiles activated fire-confusion mode ECM and threshed the controlling ships with a wall of jamming. Half the first countermissile salvo simply wandered off into space, frustrating the Dogs controlling the fleet defence systems.

The second launch was more effective as the platforms burnt out, but by that point the missile barrage was aligning for their final attacks on the exposed broadside of the chosen target, and even the targeted ship's main broadside grasers supplementing the point defence was not enough.

_Corundum, _the most exposed of the ten ships referred to by the RESN as _Mastiff_-class, writhed at the centre of a latticework of heavy laser fire. Her battle screen absorbed nearly a score of the bomb-pumped lasers before the generators melted in showers of sparks, and her armour was very, very strong – even more so than the _Alicorns, _for Diamond Dog dreadnaughts were optimized for close brawls – but not invulnerable. Alarms screamed, air boiled out of compartments ripped open by the beams, drive nodes exploded and her port broadside was reduced to ruins.

Whether _Corundum_ could have brought her relatively lightly damaged starboard broadside into play would never become apparent, however, as one of the missiles towards the end of the salvo smashed clear into her second fusion reactor and breached it, breaking her in half with the enormous explosion.

"Clean kill, ma'am." Fluttershy said, with a hint of sadness in her voice. Her hooves and wings, on the other hand, did not slow in their direction of the fleet fire mission.

* * *

"Good work. Now do it again."

* * *

By the time the second salvo stooped on _Garnet_, the captain had managed to work out that his ship was targeted. So he spun it on its' axis to interpose the belly stress band of his wedge, denying the incoming missiles their easy shots. This also had the effect of significantly degrading _Garnet_'s defence fire, but the overall result was positive. Over half of the missiles that survived to reach attack position expended themselves eroding away the battle screen, and the remainder were unable to replicate the succession of close hits that had demolished the armour and reached a reactor.

Nevertheless, the laser storm destroyed over half of the drive nodes of _Garnet, _reducing her acceleration to barely a hundred g, and completely removed the forward drive hammerhead. Such was the redundancy built into a military design that the rear nodes alone could sustain the wedge, but the ship's broadsides were pounded heavily enough that the stronger held only four grasers and five missile launchers.

* * *

As the ships closed, the tempo of the missiles increased, and less and less time was available to intercept a salvo before their trailers demanded attention. _Reprise _lost most of her shields to the fourth barrage, and the fifth demonstrated one of the weaknesses of the new design – a single laser beam from the same missile hit the centre of one of the port launcher hexes, removing six missile launchers from the barrage in a second.

Worst of all, however, was when the two fleets closed to half of their original engagement range. At one point five million kilometres, the ninth salvo to be launched could be fired under maximum acceleration and still reach its' target before the missile drives burned out – and the eighth, fired under half acceleration fifteen seconds earlier, reached its' own attack range at the same moment.

* * *

Both of the Diamond Dog ships targeted by those successive broadsides were pummelled into complete ruin, hideous bubbles of nuclear fire and lances of light destroying shields, armour and machinery. A larger explosion signalled that _Cordierite_ had barely managed to eject Fusion One before it went critical, and _Spinel_ took such heavy damage to the drive rooms that she was reduced to a solitary sublight drive node, wedge fluctuating and down to 6 g of acceleration.

The equivalent salvoes from the Diamond Dogs had been fired with their targets spread across the entirety of Sixth Fleet, and while the integration of their defences was such that they could respond to an attack on a single ship with coordinated fleet fire, there was little _more_ that could be done against a dispersed attack.

_Reprise_ took a hit on number three magazine, losing almost a hundred precious unfired missiles, and several more missile tubes and a pair of xasers were destroyed along with a dozen minor wounds. _Cavalcade_ lost her fore drive ring, instantly cutting her acceleration to half, energy blasting back from the capacitors and punishing the forward chase battery. _Hyacinth_ lost both Athena platforms, in spite of their independent battle screen and far smaller size, and the wounds along her sides destroyed a boat bay and two mercifully empty fighter bays. _Pinion_ was especially hard hit, at least one beam raking along each broadside and reducing her total throw weight to barely a dozen missiles. Her division mate, _Mystery, _came through nearly unscathed, even managing to take over the task of _Hyacinth_'s fire control in addition to her own.

And then it was _Harmony_'s turn.

Forty missiles made it through the interception zone, homing in on the ship that some Dog captain had correctly guessed was Fleet Flag, and popped up over the drive wedge stress band. A dozen were picked off by laser clusters, the remainder detonated.

Shield generators all over the ship tripped themselves out of circuit or collapsed in a shower of sparks, and then the lasers hit home on the armour.

Rarity held herself in place as the ship – _her_ ship, her beautiful _Harmony _ – writhed under the assault. Red damage icons flashed on the schematic, detailing the chaos and damage done in spite of Twilight's telekinetic trick. Two hits directly amidships, boat bay number one depressurized, fighter bays five and seven blown through…

"Captain!" Applejack's voice broke in. "Fusion three's governors just took a hit! I'm shiftin' the load to one and two, but it'll take a minute or so to do a clean shutdown."

Pinkie joined the conversation, unusually serious. "Rarity, give me control."

Rarity didn't need to think about it. "Agreed. Helm control to CIC."

* * *

Pinkie grabbed the emergency joystick in her hooves. They almost hadn't included one at all, but it was there in case of heavy battle damage.

She closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating. All that missiles really were, from her point of view, were falling objects…

Her tail twitched.

* * *

Commander Raindrops, on the bridge, looked around sharply as her link to the drive wedge died. "Captain, I think we just lost helm-"

"No, Commander. Watch." The pegasus looked at the close in tac plot, and gasped.

_Harmony _was rolling, pitching and yawing in a complex evasion pattern. And the strangest thing was, it was working. The next salvo of missiles found themselves unable to get locks for the precious extra second it took for Athena point defence to finish them off.

"How – skipper, how – who's piloting?"

"Countess Pie – _Pinkie_ Pie – is a very strange pony."

* * *

Applejack galloped into Fusion Three. "Braeburn! How's the bottle?"

"Still holdin' for now, but I can't step-down the hydrogen feeds – you'll have to do it."

The Commander glanced over at the readouts, and wished she hadn't. Braeburn was having to tighten the gravitational pinch constantly to stop the wildly out-of-control fusion reaction from escaping, and one of the side effects was that the forcing pressure was itself increasing. They had to get it sorted out within the next couple of minutes, or the pinch generators would hit their max and the bottle would fail even if no more fire came in…

She shook off the thought, and started rerouting the control links to give her back control of the hydrogen feeds themselves. Some of the software had itself been scrambled by the power surge… she'd have to just do this by ear.

"Hey, cuz, how long we got?"

"I'd say about a minute fifty till the bottle fails. Pity this ain't an external power room, eh AJ?"

"If this were an external power room, it'd have just blown t'hell the first time it actually got hit. Now keep it up!"

* * *

Down on Palomino IV-d, many of the Marines had paused in their entrenchment and were gazing up into the sky. A dense cluster of explosions was visible, down near one horizon.

Trixie walked slowly over to her commander. "She'll be alright, Mac."

"Ah hope so." He drawled. "It's just so much harder, when I can see her but I don't know how she's doing."

A particularly large flash startled some of their force for a moment.

"Must have been a fusion bottle." Trixie said quietly.

* * *

Twilight winced as another laser hit lashed at the shields. Applejack's engineers had managed to disengage some of the generators just in time to prevent wholesale loss, and the battle screen was holding again – if barely. But she could see the damage codes that indicated the ruin her command was turning into, and they were about to reach the most dangerous portion of the firing pass.

For they couldn't both dodge missiles and avoid giving the remaining _Mastiffs_ a shot with their energy weapons.

"Fluttershy! Closest approach?"

"Thirty seconds, and three hundred thousand kilometres!"

She looked over at the damage codes. _Mystery_ and _Harmony_ were the closest to intact, and the fleet still had eight or so Athena platforms…

Tirek's teeth, she was an idiot. Every Athena platform had redundant fire control!

"All ships, point defence fire plan Pinnule! Roll ship to interpose wedges with Dog fleet while inside energy range!"

Fluttershy initiated the stored program before Twilight had finished speaking.

* * *

Pinnule was an emergency measure. It involved taking some of the missile launchers _out_ of the active broadside and instead ordering them to throw canisters of countermissiles out, for any control links that still existed without an attendant launcher.

Under normal circumstances, it would have resulted in one or two launchers changing mode. But with the presence of the Athenas, it allowed Sixth Fleet to control one hundred and sixty countermissiles _per platform._

There were side effects, of course. Switching that many launchers away from attack mode meant that at least one Dog ship got away completely unharmed, the _Feldspar _able to endure the suddenly reduced missile storm with the assistance of her more damaged cohorts. And the sheer number of countermissile drive wedges produced a hail of interference that meant they nearly obscured the incoming missiles. One attack missile from _Hyacinth_ even collided with her mother ship's countermissiles.

But the result was enough. The heavily wounded ships of Sixth Fleet no longer needed to dodge missiles – except _Harmony_, now positively identified as the Equestrian flagship and target of the vast majority of the incoming salvos. Pinkie managed to steer through the cluttered space with only two more hits before closest approach, one of them a Dog electronic warfare bird that literally impacted on the battle screen.

* * *

A few seconds after closest approach and the torrent of graser fire that uselessly battered the fleet's drive bands, Applejack contacted the bridge again.

"Rarity, it's done. Fusion three's shut down properly, no more risk. Now I gotta get to all the other damage control, o'course, but I thought I'd let y'all know there's no more risk of the ship blowin' up."

"Much appreciated. Bridge out."

* * *

As the fleets sped apart again and their last few parting shots were picked off, Twilight breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank Celestia… we managed to make it through that."

Then her expression hardened. "Damage reports?"

Fluttershy looked up from her console. "Er, _Mystery_ didn't take any hits past the shield, though they lost half the capacitor rings. _Harmony_ herself no longer has a backup fusion reactor, we're down two fighter bays – fortunately we still have space for our own, though there's debris all over a few of the surviving bays that'll have to be cleared – and we've lost two missile launchers. _Cavalcade_ is badly damaged, but Ruby says they still have the rear nodes in play and some semblance of a shield. She shot herself dry, though."

"Hold on a moment, Fluttershy. Captain Ruby?"

The pony appeared on screen. Alarms could be heard through the video feed. "Yes, Admiral? Hold on a moment, Roneo. Sorry, Ma'am, CIC were reporting in."

"Understandable, Captain. I need you to coordinate chasing down the pilots that were shot-out. You can't keep company with us on only one hammerhead."

Ruby nodded smartly. "I'll find them, Ma'am. I'm good at that."

"So I have heard. Sparkle out." The window closed. "Continue, Fluttershy."

"_Reprise_ is pretty much out of missiles as well – they have about twenty birds, though according to Sparkler there are a few dozen more in the feed queues for the destroyed launchers and work crews are recovering them." Fluttershy then looked sad. "_Pinion _took the most damage. She's got maybe eight launchers left, and her fighter bays are a wreck. Crews are clearing them now. _Hyacinth_ lost both her Athena platforms, though she still has most of her broadside. Casualty counts are around two hundred or so, mostly on _Pinion_, with eighty-three fatalities fleet-wise and another ten who got time-frozen by Doctor Romana until we get back to Equestria, since they're salvageable in ideal conditions. They're on _Reprise._"

Scootaloo chimed in. "It looks like some of the fighters are going to have to orbit for a bit longer – I'll head down to the bays we took damage in to try and help clear them. We need all the hanger space we can get, and we're about five short fleet wide."

"Thank you, Commander, Ensign." She tapped a key with a hoof. "All ships excepting _Cavalcade_ to make for the moon at maximum fleet acceleration, damage control and recovery of fighters as convenient. Ensign, if you could see your way to diverting time from your efforts with the hangers, then coordinating a transfer of missiles over to _Reprise_ would be most appreciated."

"Will do, Admiral."

"Er, Admiral…" Fluttershy asked, "What about the Dog ships? I know they took heavy damage, but, er, with enough launchers they could still saturate the defence systems the marines put up…"

"Not a problem, Commander. You see…"

* * *

"Bleeding wounds!" Rover snarled, coughing. His ship had endured the clash fairly well, but fairly well differed from "unscathed", and smoke was in the air throughout those parts of the ship that were still pressurized.

"How the hell did those ponies manage to do _that?_"

By way of reply, his tactical officer brought up what analysis he had been able to manage. "First off, sir, they seem to have stripped out almost all their energy weapons. I don't know how they fit them in, but the broadsides we saw were so large I can't imagine any other explanation, even with… well. This."

Rover's eyes widened as he saw the recording. That was both broadsides firing at once… at a target on the other side of the roof of the wedge. "How did they guide them?"

"That, I don't know. Possibly they worked out how to see past their own stress bands? Certainly, being able to keep the wedge interposed gave them a great advantage defensively."

"So their broadsides were relatively normal in size – for a pure missile ship, anyway – it's just that they were able to use them both at once? It does explain how their density of fire only went down, rather than their being able to bring in undamaged broadsides. And what's this?"

"Oh, those were some kind of tethered point defence platforms. Lots of laser clusters, and they could poke out past the wedge to fire on missiles before they got a solution."

The tac officer then realized something. "Sir, I think that if they did strip out all those energy weapons, their shields might have been denser than expected as well."

"Confounded ponies… they managed to make _missiles_ do their work? Real fighting should be at point blank range, with energy weapons! Ripping into the enemy!"

"I agree, Captain."

"Well, we're past them… even _if_ we did lose four ships, basically lose a fifth, and have the rest of the fleet battered half to rubble. Get me the best trajectory you can for an orbit around the installation, I think I want to see the assault brigade at work myself."

His navigator turned to the board, typing away.

The tac officer suddenly frowned. "That's strange. I'm picking up sensor ghosts."

Rover shrugged. "Probably battle damage. Spirit alone knows we took enough."

* * *

Silver Star spoke quietly. "Fire."

* * *

Fluttershy watched with amazement as twenty-four fresh fighters, and almost a hundred missiles, exploded from empty space within half a million kilometres of the Dog force.

At that range and bearing, flight time was under thirty seconds, and the Dogs had _known_ they were safe. Their entire fleet was destroyed for no loss by the time the third salvo had expended itself, and the fighters were almost completely unnecessary except as confirmation.

"And that," Twilight said with just a hint of satisfaction, "Is that."

* * *

AN: I was totally raiding my copy of An Introduction to the Rock Forming Minerals for the names of those Dog dreadnaughts. Also, the command crew of _Cavalcade_ are immigrants from Story of the Blanks, now rather more productively engaged.

Of the fighter pilots, I've tried to keep them canonical, though I believe Echo and Surprise are Wonderbolts from Ask blogs only. I don't know if Echo is present in other gens.

So, fight scene. How'd it go?


	4. Chapter 4

"Right, everyone. Fleet accel?" Twilight asked.

"Ah, one-ninety." Fluttershy volunteered. "_Pinion_ holds us back a lot, but they've also got quite a lot of fighter bays."

"Given the choice, I'll keep the fighters and spend more time." Twilight said with finality. "They're a substantial portion of our firepower anyway. Work out a rendezvous with third division in as short a time as possible, don't compromise our accel curve though. Remember, if we do pass the Hyper limit it might be easier to just dump velocity there."

"I'll get on it."

"Thank you, Fluttershy. Oh, and keep an eye on that _Kennel_, I'm a bit put off by it just hanging around like that."

* * *

"Okay, Admiral, it looks like about two hours ten minutes to reach Palomino-IV d on a zero/zero intercept." Fluttershy said a few minutes later. "Third division have to make up some overtake, but they can rendezvous with us before our at-rest point, let alone our turnover."

"Thank you again. That's good news. And what of the second Dog fleet?"

"They found an extra few g somewhere. They'll beat us to the planet, but not by much."

"They must really be redlining that freighter's drive, then." Twilight mused. "What about if they don't go for zero/zero and dump a lot of velocity on entry for the assault brigade?"

"I'm assuming that. Without it, we'd beat them back by about ten minutes."

"Very well. Transmit an appraisal of the current situation to the groundside forces, and emphasize that we can't give them any sort of fighter support until we've dealt with their orbital forces and then rearmed the fighters." Twilight manipulated her console. "Dash, you alright?"

"Yeah. Lost a few, but _Cavalcade_'s off to pick up all the shot-out pilots. Better tell AJ to get breaking out that spare fighter we have crated up, though, Derpy lost her second fighter."

"Yes, I saw the manoeuvre. Inspired. I wonder if it would work on an enemy missile launch…"

"Eh, you can work that out later. I've just received the green light from Scoots – my bay's clear. Dash out."

"Engineering. How's the ship, Commander?"

"Could be worse. Hell, could' a been that we blew up ten minutes ago – fusion reactor going critical ain't like some fission pile."

"Can she fight?"

"Depends how much. We still got the Apollo links, tight as you please, but energy range'd be more dicey than usual. And we got missiles for only a few salvoes."

"I see. We're going to try to rectify some of that with Third Division's magazines, but it'll be more for your work parties to do."

"Ah'm game. So long as ah don't have to do it by my lonesome. That never works."

Twilight managed a chuckle. "Okay. Flag out. CIC."

Pinkie's face appeared. "Hiya! What is it?"

"Well, I noticed that you were steering us for the last part of that missile engagement. Er, why is that?"

"It's just something I can do. I can kinda-sorta-tell the future at times, and I felt it a-coming so I took the helm. I've done it before, AJ and Rarity can tell you, they were on the _Harmony_ last cruise! That's part of how we avoided getting damaged much!" Pinkie rattled off.

Twilight blinked. "Er, I see. Okay, don't let me keep you."

"Okie Dokie!" The screen blanked.

"I swear, I will never understand that pony…"

Lt. Lyra nodded from her chair. "She's stranger than sea serpents, and that's saying a lot."

* * *

Fluttershy's wings flapped out in shock, then she pulled them hastily back in and blushed. "Er, sorry…"

"Don't worry. What is it?"

"The wedge signature of that _Kennel_ just vanished off the scope. It was really sudden, and I didn't spot their hyper generator cycling up. I know that I shouldn't be able to pick it up at this range, but – well, the light speed sensors didn't spot anything."

"Hmmm… put them on screen. I want to see what it was doing."

The screen lit, with images in several bands of light, from UV to visible to IR and radar. The sidebars indicated that very little had changed in the past hour or so.

"Well, who knows. Maybe they-"

The gunboat tender abruptly exploded.

"-Whoa! What just happened!"

* * *

The repeater screens in the pilot's ready room displayed the sudden explosion. Dash frowned, then nodded over at it. "Wonder what caused that?"

"My bad." Derpy said casually, munching on a muffin.

Most of the squadron did a double take. "What?"

"Oh, sorry. When we fought the gunboats, I had a decoy missile that got hit on the ECM emitter. I was going to just throw it away, but I saw that the gunboat ship hadn't actually put any drive power on since it appeared. So I made a guess that it wasn't going to do that at all, and sent the missile on its' way. Sort of a special delivery."

Dash found her voice. "You mean you sent a tiny little missile the size of my leg off towards a gunboat tender nearly two light minutes away, just to see if they were going to manoeuvre out of the way?"

"Yep! Muffin' doing!"

Scootaloo shook her head wearily, and trotted out of the room. On the way, she shouted back "Now I have to tell the bay crews to stencil even more silhouettes on the side of your new fighter!"

"Oh, _Dinky Doo. _Yes, thank you muchly for doing that." Derpy said brightly.

"What did you name that one after? I know you named the first one _Ditzy Doo_, and your one that was destroyed was _Muffin Too_ – not a bad joke, actually – but _Dinky_?"

"Daughter." She replied, and returned to her meal.

* * *

"Uhh, Admiral? Dash here. Thought you should know – that gunboat tender? It was, er, Derpy. Again."

"Somehow, I'm less surprised than I should be. Thank you for letting me know, Colonel. How's your squadron?"

"Bay crews are fixing up what damage we took – mostly a matter of redundant links that got burned out by the blasts, lost capacitors on the battle screen, that sort of thing. Derpy's taken one of the crated spare fighters as she can fly it. Oh, and I assume you want the anti-shipping loadout?"

"You assume correctly. We're going to want their space forces destroyed before we can start interfering in the ground battle – that is, as much as we can interfere, given that it looks like they'll make it down first."

"Yeah, I gotcha. Given the kind of firepower Dog mechs have, it'll be fighter strikes all the way – can't let anything as relatively un-manoeuvrable as this turn up in close LOS of them. Especially with most of the shield generators melted and on only two reactors."

"Exactly my reasoning. Make sure to replenish the decoy missiles as well, though."

Dash chuckled. "Don't have to tell me twice. Those things saved our flanks. Well, I'll leave you to it – I got some squadrons to reorganize. Dash out."

* * *

Fluttershy careted an icon. "Turnover. The transport's going to hit atmosphere at, er, wow. That's… quite fast."

"Good thing they're coming in on the other side to the installation, that's going to be a brutal airshock on the atmosphere as they slow down. Might even cause some kind of typhoon in the next few days, that much heat dumped into the atmosphere and hence the oceans. I think our fighter pilots might be needed to do extra cloud-busting duty."

"Er, I knew Rainbow Dash at one point, before, I mean. She's very fast outside the cockpit as well as in it – she might be able to do quite a lot on her own."

"Most fighter jocks are pretty fast out of their birds. It's how they get the reflexes they need." Twilight looked distant for a moment. "I wonder what it's like. I mean, I found a spell to generate wings, but they're fragile butterfly-things, and they don't really work well with actual speed flying. Teleporting is much quicker."

Fluttershy looked downcast. "I've never been a fast flyer. It's part of why I'm a tac officer – not many pegasi go into tactical, and our spatial senses help with fleet planning." By the end of the sentence, she was barely audible.

"Oh, I didn't mean to upset you. Come on. Go and get some rest for an hour or so, you've only had a few hours of sleep. Actually, we'd better all do that."

"O-okay, thank you."

* * *

Rarity blinked. No, she wasn't imagining that – the telltales on her console had just showed _Harmony'_s maximum shield strength doubling.

"Applejack, this is the Captain. Did you just manage to bring two extra generators online?"

"Yep, ah did. Just running a full-power test for now, since they take a load of power, but we're going to step them down and then put the last pair we're workin' on up for the same."

"But however did you manage to work this miracle? We don't carry nearly enough spares, I thought."

"Well, we got a mighty capable machine and 'tronics shop. Few spare parts for things like drive nodes, 'an some of the xaser projectors, and of course we took Fusion three apart… they're not so hard to make when you git down to it, 'specially with enough willing hooves. It's a good thing we didn't take a hit on hold three, though, that's where mosta this stuff was."

Rarity frowned. Applejack was considerably understating her achievement – warship parts were hardly modular. In fact, it must have been a considerable achievement even getting the parts to the same workshop – the only xaser projectors on the ship were fore and aft, while the shutdown fusion reactor was amidships. And as for the software needed to get that monstrosity to work properly…

"If you say it's fine, then it's fine, AJ. Good work, though I don't even begin to understand how you did it."

"Sure thang. And Rarity?"

"Yes?"

"Ah think that's the first time y'all ever used mah nickname. Thanks."

* * *

"So. Any questions?"

Every pony in the room, and a number of them on board the other six ships still in company with _Harmony_, digested the plan.

Silver Star spoke first. "So the plan is to mix in the missiles with the fighters?"

"Correct." Twilight replied." We've programmed an IFF discriminator into them, of course. Though it's more a case of timing the missiles so they arrive as the fighters make their run, so the fighter-launched shipkillers can add to it. We're planning on seeding as many EW birds as we can, both fire-confusion heads and deception-mode heads, into the salvo to draw enemy fire – as far as we know, the Dogs don't have anything, even ARAD missiles," an ancient term for missiles that homed in on 'radar' sources, "able to discriminate between latest generation ECM and the real thing."

"And then you want the fighters to fight a close action with those monster _Pitbulls_? Fighters don't have a drive wedge to block with. It'd be an awful risk."

"I don't deny that. But we have made readjustments to the fighter ordnance packs. They've been equipped with one heavy deception-mode missile each that's been set to replicate the signature of an entire fighter–and-decoy shoal, and since the decoys are programmable to some extent we've latched two of them to each deception-mode missile to replace losses – without betraying the fighters themselves, that is. In addition, we've switched mode on the fighter battle screen to ablative – it won't take many hits like that, but it will be able to take a plasma cannon shot without simply killing the pilot." Ablative mode didn't try to absorb the energy of a shot and reradiate it as normal battle screen did, instead flaring the shield outwards and dispersing it in response to a hit – any hit. "And finally, we're spotting missiles into space with a firing delay, so we can manage the maximum density the Athena platforms can control – totalling about six hundred and sixty missiles in addition to our remaining standard control links. I know that after that we'll have maybe two normal salvos each, but it's the best chance we have."

"Yeah, yeah, point taken. Guess it just don't feel right, I'm used to having a lot more missiles in my magazines."

"That's the nature of the beast with this new ship design. I know one thing I plan on recommending the second we get back to Epona is about twice the magazine space. I'm afraid we didn't really look much at slower-speed firing passes when we were gaming the technology out – that and fighting at a numerical disadvantage."

Scootaloo raised her voice next. "Would it be possible to use cloak ECM on the fighters to get around into a better attack position?"

"Unfortunately, no. It's something I considered, but we'd have to remove either the laser pack or one of the missile packs to fit it on, and either option leaves the fighters a little under gunned for taking on a dreadnaught. Good question, and if we had more time to work the fleet around into a blind spot as well I'd do it, but the longer they're in orbit the more they can wear down the installation's defences – ten minutes is pushing it as it is."

"Okay." The fleet ATO nodded to herself, digesting the explanation – and lesson.

"Hey! Uh, Firefly here, Brindle's squadron leader?"

"I recognize your voice. And attitude. You and Colonel Dash are too much alike." Twilight smiled to take away the sting. "Anyway, your question?"

"Any reason we can't send a few decoy shoals under shipboard control to fake attacks from other directions? I mean, they use countermissile links, right? And your Athena platforms have the links to spare."

"An excellent suggestion. Ensign, would you mind getting it set up? Decoy missiles are one thing we have in abundance."

"Uh, okay! Each fake squadron would take a lot of links, though…"

"Not a problem – use rotating links for pairs. That should let you manage to fake, oh, about three times our total squadron strength complete with attendant decoys. We'll be going in stern-first, by the way – that'll keep our shipboard control links clear for the actual countermissiles, and of course let us complete deceleration. Now, as for target assignment, we can assume that the _Pitbulls_ are…"

* * *

"Status change! Their main body has gone to full power deceleration for the dreadnaughts, while the transport is maintaining its' own maximum power. Separation between their vectors is opening at one point five KPS squared."

"Thank you. Does that affect our timings in any way?"

"We'll reach them a few minutes sooner relative to their time they reach the moon, but apart from that not really." Fluttershy checked another time tick. "Fighter launch in thirty seconds. Ensign, prepare the decoy missiles."

Next to her, Scootaloo activated the Athena platforms and brought the main missile broadsides online. Many of the launchers had as their first round a canister of decoy missiles, as the most effective way of getting them into space without emptying the revolver magazines of the fighters.

"Ready, commander." Her own eyes were now glued to the clock as it spun down through the final seconds.

"Colonel?" She said quietly, as it went past five.

"Yeah, Scoots?" Came back over her communicator. Dash's voice was slightly odd-sounding from the effect of the cockpit acoustics, but the eagerness came through clearly enough.

"Scramble."

* * *

Dash gave a wild grin. "You got it!"

With a sensation like the first downbeat of her wings on takeoff, she shot forth from _Harmony_ and straight out of the forward aspect of the drive wedge (facing away from the moon, since the ship was decelerating.)

Glancing at her flight board to ensure everyone else was in space, and lingering for a moment on the pair of fighters flown by Derpy to check she was running _Dinky Doo_ properly, she began setting up her squadron and decoys. Each squadron was going to be operating semi-independently on this attack, coming in from widely dispersed vectors, and to get that organized in the fifteen minutes or so before the attack went in she had to hurry.

At least she didn't have to worry about her own fighter. She'd only been flying _Wonderbolt_ for a few months, but the _Aurora_ felt more like the extension of her body it was supposed to be than even her old _Sonic Rainboom_.

Lights pinged green. Her squadron were ready and formed up. She watched as the other five shook into formation, as did the swarms of countermissiles running Scootaloo's program. She noticed that they had used their launch geometries to appear as one sprouting five more, just like the fighter signatures themselves. Attention to detail.

Her squadron was the third cluster of points to start moving to their start positions, after one decoy cloud and Firefly's fifth.

* * *

The _Chondrite_-class Diamond Dog assault transport _Coesite_ occupied well over a million cubic metres of space, with a wedge hundreds of kilometres on a side and the capacity for an entire armoured brigade in its' holds. This kind of manoeuvre was one it was designed to be able to perform – using the enormous, perfectly flat, inviolate plane of the wedge as an air brake.

The coupling between the wedge and the hull was extremely inefficient when engaged, with only a tenth of a percent of the theoretical momentum change being actually exerted on the hull. But the sheer size of the wedge meant that there was a lot of force to go around. As the plane of focused gravity swept down the air literally could not get out of the way fast enough, compressing in front of the ship, heating to incandescence and leaving a vacuum behind.

All the gravity plates on the ship itself were capable of cancelling most of the effects of the manoeuvre when it was performed as shallowly as this, barely skimming into the atmosphere at first. That didn't mean it was enjoyable, and the passengers and crew of the _Coesite_ had to briefly cope with gravitational stresses well over ten g.

For ten seconds, the ship left a blazing trail of plasma behind it, and then it slowed to the point the compression heating of the air no longer ionized it and entered a rather more normal flight regime in counter-gravity. _Coesite _lumbered down over the expanse of the main continent, crossing hundreds of kilometres of steppe, gentle plains and the occasional mountain range, before alighting minutes after it had begun descent in a catchment feeding the river Fluttershy had identified days before.

Her marker was barely a kilometre out.

But those minutes of descent were hardly idle ones above.

* * *

Rarity checked something on the main screen. "Admiral, I see the assault transport has reached the moon. Initial sensors show heat pulse on the farside, humidity skyrocketing."

"Acknowledged, Captain. However, we have Dogs of our own to deal with. Please pass order to all ships to begin spotting their missiles for the attack."

The seven dreadnaughts ceased their deceleration towards the planet, coasting with wedges on standby. Those of them with mostly full magazines – principally _Stellar _and _Brindle_ – started launching missiles under no-power settings at maximum rate. Ninety-six flowed into space every fifteen seconds, and one by one Athena platforms took control of their allotment.

With the launch geometries, the range for missiles on full power was barely greater than that for the countermissiles – and both forces were holding their fire in a kind of game of chicken, not willing to fire on half power lest they provoke the other into doing the same.

But now, with Sixth Fleet still a considerable time from the planet, they were forcing the issue. _Hounds_ were less powerful than the _Mastiffs_ they'd torn apart with missile fire, but their smaller energy signatures and the nature of the two fleets' make up made the discrepancy in their armaments much less than it should be. The cruisers were agile enough to dodge missile fire more adroitly than a dreadnaught, fast enough to close the distance with their enemy at unsettling rates, and more heavily armed in energy broadside than even _Reprise_ and _Cavalcade._

The _Pitbulls_, of course, were even worse. Escort ships built on dreadnaught hulls, they made use of all the tonnage saved in missile armament with heavier point defence, stronger shields, tougher armour – and twenty-four enormous Plasma Cannons, firing blasts of energy _each_ powerful enough to overload a shield generator.

All of this meant that a close range clash with the Dog fleet would heavily damage Sixth, possibly even destroy them. Fighters, on the other hand, were such tiny targets that most of that heavy firepower would find itself without a hard lock, and useless – so they with their internal lasers could do the killing, knifing through armour at ranges that prevented beam dispersion and maximized the effects of the weapons.

"Missile spot complete." Fluttershy said, as _Harmony_'s Athena platforms took the last of their share. By now, even _Stellar _and_ Brindle_ were careted with an icon marking critical ammunition shortage.

"Fighters in place." Scootaloo said, across her.

"Execute." Twilight said softly, and nearly eighteen hundred missiles came to life.

* * *

Dash saw the storm front of missiles appear barely a million kilometres from the Dog ships, and gave a feral grin entirely out of place on a herbivore. "Alright, everyone, good hunting!"

_Wonderbolt_ snapped to full dogfighting acceleration, and her squadron followed her. And the other five squadrons, and the swarming decoy missiles. They made a massive target for enemy point defence, of course, though only one in twenty-four of the signatures represented a real fighter.

But the Dogs had other things on their minds at the moment. The launch range of the missiles was short enough they had only three countermissile launches, and they'd been ready for something – not this, but _something_ – so their first launches were off while the attack front was still shaking down into formation. But every countermissile that went the way of the missile storm was one not aimed at the fighter group.

Dash watched the range counters spinning down. She was well within shipkiller range, but firing them would reveal which of the squadrons were the true ones. So she held fire, held fire, until the other broadsides of the Dog ships began firing at the fighters.

Only then did she order the launch, and dozens of fresh missiles slashed in from the _Auroras._

The broadsides of the _Pitbulls _and _Hounds_ were up to the task of destroying the missiles, of course – they were moving slowly, the demands of minaturization to fit an enormous warhead in a missile that could be launched from a fighter meaning they were sluggish and "idiotic" – but it took time and weapons away from killing fighters, and the fighter wing stooped on their targets in the wake of their shipkillers.

"Don't linger for now, remember!" Scootaloo reminded everyone. "You've got to break off before the ship missiles arrive!"

"Yeah, I got it." Dash muttered. Spinning _Wonderbolt_ on its' central axis, she darted towards the stern wedge aspect of a _Hound_, locking the shot into the fighter's powerful but specialized computer.

The rest of the squadron did the same, moving in a complex dance to confuse the fire control of the enemy point defence clusters, then fired in rapid sequence with both internal and pack-mounted lasers. The battle screen of the _Hound_ flared as the high-energy blasts pocked it, and two fighters shifted aim as a black patch of local failure appeared – probably a result of a capacitor blowing. Lasers that strobed through that gap hit the rear chase weapons, resulting in an immediate reduction in the fire targeting the squadron, and as the pegasi continued their aerial ballet more of them were able to exploit the gap – until, with a flare, the shield shut down completely.

Unfortunately, by that point the fighters were barely a thousand kilometres away.

Dash hauled _Wonderbolt_ away in a high-side vector turn, feeling the drive strain as it she were making a turn with her own wings, and glanced back as she completed the wheel.

The _Hound_ was racked with explosions, stern to bow, and most of them seemed to result from deep wounds along the top and bottom. That wasn't surprising per se, the dorsal and ventral angles of a warship weren't armoured – the wedge was so close to the hull, relatively speaking, that adding armour there was almost pointless compared to spending the mass budget on weapons or on thicker side armour – but that at least two of her fighters had made the audacious decision to fly _inside_ the wedge was astonishing. Checking, she saw that _Dinky Doo_ had done it, along with Wind Whistler's _Buccaneer._

"Nice work, Whistler, Derpy!" She congratulated them over the squadron channel. "And well done, everyone, if the rest of the wing did that well then we might not _need_ the missiles!"

Those were her last words before a flare of intolerably bright light, and then blackness.

* * *

"Tracking… three cruisers out of commission, Admiral, and only one dreadnaught still has shields!" Scootaloo said excitedly. "I'm reading… oh, no."

"What?" Twilight said urgently, alerted by the sudden change in her assistant tactical officer's voice and stance. Getting up, she walked over to the station.

Rainbow Dash's icon, alone of the entire strike, had gone red – fighter lost. And unlike most of the casualties they'd suffered earlier on, there wasn't the yellow halo of a life pod.

"What happened?"

Fluttershy didn't answer, too busy updating the final attack targets as the missile strike roared in, though tears rolled down her face.

Scootaloo eventually forced herself to explain. "By the looks of it, one of those monster plasma c-cannons hit her, and the shield ablation wasn't enough. Some of the blast leaked through, and – those, those guns are meant to hurt ships _our_ size!"

Feeling tears start in her own eyes, Twilight suppressed them as best she could. Her ponies needed her, and they needed her competent, not grieving over a single colonel who just happened to be part of her command team – and who'd got to know her, been a friend.

"Fluttershy. Report." She said, voice like iron.

Nobody on the flag bridge was fooled, though. Not after seeing their Admiral's eyes glistening.

* * *

Dash came groggily to consciousness, and felt out of place. Like her head was full of felt, like something was missing.

Blinking them open, she saw that she was in the cockpit of a fighter. That was fairly normal. But why was she asleep? And why wasn't she _flying_ the fighter? The rush of the engines like wind at her back, the throb of the reactor like a second heartbeat?

Still groggy, she looked around, and more things leapt out at her as wrong. The dashboard – hee, dash-board – was dark, instead of being covered with lights. The heads-up display was missing entirely. And everything in front of her, past the window, was spinning crazily…

_Tailspin._ She thought automatically, practically reflex from flight school. _Stall, coupled with uncoordinated turning. Recover by correcting rotation rate to stabilize, then decrease angle of attack to regain control._

Then it hit her. She was _out_ of control. Something had blasted her fighter so severely that it no longer functioned, but the cockpit and some of the remainder was still intact.

By the looks of things, even the beacon was dead. She probably seemed lost from the outside, which explained why the Dogs hadn't finished the job with a laser cluster or something. But since she was so close to the planet, she must have been out for several minutes – the planet!

"Oh, great…" she muttered. "I'm not just shot out, but I've managed to find a way to be shot _down_."

Focus. Crashing. First things first, get out of the fighter. Her beloved _Wonderbolt_ was now more of a hunk of dead weight acting as a meteorite, and it was going to dig an impressive hole in the ground – yes, she was heading towards the ground, not the sea. From what she could see in the spin, anyway.

Her wings were trapped. In the neural links. They wouldn't disengage with the power off her wings were trapped she couldn't escape trapped unable to fly-

With an almighty wrench, she pulled the link equipment itself free. She could remove it by mouth and hoof later, it was mainly wires. No stunt flying for her until they were removed, though – they may not have actually pierced her skin, but they'd infiltrated her feathers right _to_ the skin to get the induction loops in the right places.

The air was starting to glow around the cockpit. This was the most dangerous part. If she acted too early, she would be too high to breathe. Too late, and the fragment of fighter would probably start to melt around her, incinerating her.

_Now._

Sitting back on her haunches, she kicked out with all her strength at the canopy. It moved slightly, the magnetic seals having been scrambled by the Electro-Magnetic Pulse along with everything else. A howling like all the world's Windigoes came through the gap.

Again. The canopy fell away, and she was carried out like a leaf in a storm.

* * *

"That's all of them picked up, Admiral." Fluttershy said quietly. "There were only half a dozen or so life pods from the Diamond Dog ships, and two fighter pilots shot out."

She typed something into her console, and a map of the landmass appeared with a caret at the corner of the hologram. "The transport is on final approach. We're keeping it under observation with passive satellites in high orbit, and unfortunately we can't get into ground attack range before they can deploy at least two _Shitzu_."

Twilight nodded. _Shitzu_ mechs carried six gigantic plasma cannons almost a meter in diameter each, and their combined firepower would allow them to destroy her command's complete dreadnaught strength in around a minute.

"Looks like it's up mainly to the ground team, then. Captain Rarity," a channel opened, "My compliments, and please let the marine contingent know that their guests have landed."

"Of course, Admiral."

* * *

Rarity's own comms officer had already opened a line to Major Macintosh while the two unicorns were speaking, and her next words followed almost immediately. "Major, Diamond Dogs have landed. Proceed as planned."

"Aye-yup, ma'am."

* * *

Twilight stood up again, and walked around the hologram. "Where will we need to be, to stay out of the line of fire of the _Shitzu_ mechs but still be able to interdict the airspace around the installation? If they can swarm it with their air cavalry, we're in trouble."

Two ridges blinked red as Fluttershy highlighted them. "These are the highest divides in the range. They block line of sight with the entire route of advance of their main body. By manoeuvring around under low power, we can keep the second one under our guns along with all subsequent ridge divides. Keeping that in mind, the air cavalry units will be forced to either face four or five full chase energy weapon barrages," which would leave them winnowed down to barely platoon strength – if the fleet's gunners missed half their shots. "Or land in between the ridges and hence come down that valley to the main Marine blocking position from a flank. That second option would mean they could keep in ground weapon cover against orbital ships, but fighters should be able to slip through and bombard their column. Not to mention that a battalion of light infantry won't do well against an entrenched marine brigade."

"What if they took one or two ridge hops to attempt an outflank – no, I see. The valleys they could land in then simply lead into the flanking one in the first place."

"That or have them travel so close to the Marine position they'd be shot down anyway, yes."

"Right. Ensign, I'm going to need your fighters again. They'll have to harass the Dog main column, possibly with airbursting shipkillers – individual ones won't get through their battle screen, but can probably do substantial harm to the infantry and _Schnauzers_ in company with them. Those aren't as dangerous, but the kind of concentrated power needed to handle a heavy mech is going to be harder with that rapid reaction capability on the enemy's side."

Twilight paused. "In fact, the major problem is those _Akitas._ They're much lighter than a _Shitzu_, but they have those single use missile cells."

The cells of an _Akita_ carried 24 nuclear cruise missiles each, in two packs of twelve. Their purpose was to wipe away individual blocking positions that were too heavy for the _Shitzu_ they rode in company with.

"Right, I think we might need a combat air patrol. Drop a few shipkillers into any missile storm they send up, to thin it out. Hopefully with that kind of reduction the point defence stations the marines set up – and their unicorns – will be able to handle it."

Fluttershy checked a sidebar. "That's a lot of missiles they have."

"True. But see if we can transfer extra countermissiles down to the ground. Nothing fancy, just pointing straight up in the floodplain with sufficient separation for launch. With the Athena platforms we can thicken the ground forces' defences. And one of the problems with warheads that powerful fired in job lots is that firing them line of sight is basically an interesting way to commit suicide – so we should have the tracking time."

"I'll see to it. We're running low on countermissiles, though."

"We've still got a lot of fighter ammunition." Scootaloo volunteered. "At least as much again as we've expended – and I bet a few gun packs used in atmosphere would tear up anything not protected by a battle screen."

"Very good thought, Ensign. But balance that against manoeuvre capacity, remember. Fighters are relatively ungainly in atmosphere, even with the surfaces deployed." Fighter surfaces were an adaptation of battle screen, projected out from the fighter's stubby wings to give them extra atmospheric turning capacity. Not much, but often useful – especially when the fighter's main screen was up.

In a way, it was analogous to the ancient variable-wing fighters. Down to how external weapon packs also harmed speed and response.

"Okay." Scootaloo turned to her superior. "Let me know when the first enemy units start to move out, please. I'll arm the fighters up for taking on the air cavalry flying column, and get that combat air patrol set up."

* * *

Rainbow Dash struggled out of the surf, coughing up seawater. She'd managed to steer herself into the shallows instead of plunging into the landmass itself, but there'd been too much momentum for her to entirely lose it with her wings constrained.

There was already a storm front on the horizon, the effects of the transport's flamboyant atmospheric insertion making themselves known. She shivered. Pegasus coats and feathers were usually great insulation, but plunging into the sea at high speed and then coming through a crashing surf zone had pretty much soaked her to the skin. And with the rain coming on, she needed to find somewhere to stay out of it.

Nothing to the west… but there was a large headland to the east, one that bulged near the water and curved back away from it. That kind of structure sometimes had caves, she remembered from somewhere, and in any case being able to huddle against a corner would be better than nothing.

Sneezing, she ruffled her soaked feathers and set off at a walk. She'd preen herself until she could fly, then see about getting something to eat and heading above the clouds.

* * *

AN: As anyone who has read Old Soldiers will see, these are Boloverse vehicles the Dogs are using. Bootleg copies of Surturs, Fenrises and Heimdalls. This is a Bad Thing, since that's the same universe the Hellbore comes from.

I felt it appropriate for the doglike Melconians to inspire the Diamond Dogs' weaponry.

Oh, and was anyone fooled by what nearly happened to Dash?

I've also updated chapters 1-3, so they should be more polished now. Let me know what you think of the change.

* * *

Ponies in Space Omake: Occupational Hazard

* * *

"Well?" Twilight asked.

"Confirmed, Admiral." Rarity replied from the main bridge, her eyes flicking over the report. "It's definitely some kind of ancient edifice that predates modern Equestrian civilization, we can tell that from the ionization of the surface material. But there are ponies recorded in the inscriptions on the structure."

"Fascinating." Twilight said. "It seems that we chose an interesting planet to do our bombardment practice on. General order: the training schedule is postponed indefinitely. This bears closer investigation."

She stood up. "Marine detachment. Major, I need a platoon for ground security of the sites. This is a wild planet and a modern fauna-type biosphere, there could be anything down there. Load for Ursa." With a flicker of magic, she closed the connection. "Lt. Lyra, Spike. Join me in boat bay one in two hours. Be ready for an extended foray planetside."

As she left, Spike hurried to walk alongside. "Twilight, are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, it's an entirely unexplored planet."

"I want to see this myself, Spike. I've always been fascinated in things like this. Besides," she grinned. "It's not as if anyone can stop me. There are advantages to full Admiral rank."

* * *

"Yes, this is a unicorn, and this a pegasus…" Lyra muttered, taking notes. "The iconography suggests a connection with the Pegasian civilization under the Achemaneids. And this is… possibly the earliest example of an Alicorn in any archaeological site. It comes from before the recorded appearance of Celestia and Luna by well over five hundred years."

The group then turned a corner, and Snips nearly dropped his staff as he gasped.

There was a giant circular gate, easily three metres tall, next to a pedestal with a number of metal buttons.

Lyra cantered over to it faster than the marine escort could keep up. "This is technology far more advanced than I expected. It's possible this is how all these connections came about! We have to stay here to study this, Admiral. This could be a work of the Human civilization."

"I thought those were only theoretical." Twilight said, but starting to wonder herself.

"Okay. This star system has two binary planet systems… that must be this icon. And…" she opened a file on a dataslate, then called the _Harmony_ overhead. "Hello, CIC? Can you put me through to Polaris? ...thank you. Tell me, Polaris, can you use the computers there and your astronomy programs to work out which three pairs of stars would define the point in space of Equestria?"

* * *

For the next few minutes, Lyra cleaned off the circular gate with weak air currents. Finally, the reply came back.

She walked outside to check the local star patterns, conversed with Polaris a little more, then confidently began typing.

"Er, how?" Twilight asked.

"Seven internal rings. They can rotate to align with each of the seven outer chevrons. You need two intersecting lines and an origin point to describe a transformation from one point to another – the binary planets are the origin point, the intersecting lines are based on stars from constellations in this sky. And the third pair of points is for error correction."

With a flourish, she typed in the last symbol. The rings began to ponderously rotate, locking in one after another.

Both marines, Twilight, Lyra and Spike watched in mounting excitement.

And then a creature composed of a mixture of dragon, horse, ram, eagle and a half dozen other things walked through the portal that formed.

"Like it?" he asked. "It's a nice one this time, isn't it? Did it have you fooled?"

Lyra looked crushed. Spike rolled his eyes.

Twilight's mane began to smoulder. "Discord! This is the fifth time you've done this!"

"Mon petit pony, you should have worked out by now that I make _all_ the ancient impossible historical relics." He shrugged. "You solved the puzzle in this one very quickly, though. My compliments."

* * *

AN: Yes, Lyra encounters Stargate. I thought this would be a fun little aside.

Polaris, by the way, is a name for the astronomer pony who set up the optical telescope in chapter 3.


	5. Chapter 5

"Cursed strange planet."

Fido glanced to the speaker, his communication officer. They were supervising the unloading of 2/1st, one heavy _Phreatic_ mech and two medium _Pyroclastic_ mechs, from his ancillary command vehicle. The hundred-tonne command tank wasn't in the same league as the gigantic heavy mechs, but it was also a lot more agile. When his command mech was unloaded he would simply transfer from one to the other. Until then, however, the ability to drive around their landing site at relative speed was useful.

Two other mech battalions were already out of the transport, their heavy plasma cannons sniffing the air near the ridges in case the ponies tried their luck. Otherwise this _would_ have been too risky.

"I know what you mean." The Brigadier-general replied with a harsh bark. "Nothing moving except plants. It's not natural."

He sobered. "Still, we're not here for that. We have to take their research base, get the data downloaded. Or failing that, destroy it. Intel indicates that they have something revolutionary at work here."

"You think we'll manage it?"

"Of course!" Fido said, chuckling with a confidence he didn't feel. "This is an entire planetary siege brigade! The most they could have to stop us is whatever marines those ships had, and that means no war machines at all."

True, as far as it went. But the damnable ponies didn't _need_ war machines half the time. Not with their paradoxical magic.

At least the enormous hurricane developing offshore wouldn't completely wreck their weaponry, unlike what would happen to an equivalent Gryphon Legion. The Gryphons used discrete bolt of copper plasma from guns with bores measured in 1cm for the handguns to almost 20cm for their big panzers, but they liberated their energy on the first thing they hit – including water droplets. The backflash from a Gryphon powergun firing in the rain could start fires – or worse.

Diamond Dogs went in for an entirely different scale. Their heavies' _80_cm plasma cannons fired fusing hydrogen in blasts most of a second long, and cleared their path with a laser pulse beforehand to ionize as much of the air as possible. There was still a bit of back-scatter, but the battle screen their mechs were big enough to project could handle it.

Their infantry, on the other hand, used rockets and single-shot fusion lances as heavy weapons, and simple ballistics as light equipment. Less destructive or versatile than a 1cm or 2cm powergun, and the ammunition was a lot heavier, but again unaffected by the weather. Had this been a Gryphon installation, in fact, the transport would have induced the hurricane deliberately simply to lock down their weapons.

* * *

"What's the plan, then, sir?"

Fido's viewpoint hovered over a virtual map of the area, the cyberspace avatars of his subordinates around him. "We send two companies of Caesar's air cavalry around the western flank, and one to the east. That gives us the chance to envelop if they hold either of the potential choke points." He turned to the company and battalion commanders for the air cavalry. "Infiltrate a platoon up to the lip of the gorge to check if they have any defensive positions prepared there, then make your way to the final confluences before the second choke point. That's out of direct fire range. Keep your shuttles around in case you need to rapidly redeploy, and for air support if they leave small detachments in the valleys."

"Your will." They replied, bowing.

"First light battalion to sweep ahead to the gorge, then to the end of it as soon as it has been scouted. Skirmishes with what blocking positions exist only, and give us spotting information. Second to remain at the transport to guard it. Third in company with the mechs, which will be advancing in elongated wedge formation. All units, especially the _Ignimbrite _light mechs, to have weapons in air-defence mode unless otherwise necessary. And don't take too many risks, the mech battalions are the real punch here."

He grinned, showing a lot of teeth. "Hell or victory, pack brothers!"

* * *

"Well, they're movin' out." Mac said, at his own map table. "Them air cavalry shuttles are stayin' back further than I'd like."

"Yes, but it does make sense." Caramel said. "They can't fight us alone, so they're going to stay back as long as possible. Fighters can't really support us until their units are at least into the foothills, which is several hours away for the main body. And that means their light unit is going to reach the gorge unopposed."

"We don't have a lot of options for that one." Mac agreed amiably. "And that ain't as much of a problem – I'd back our colts n' fillies against twice their number of Dog infantry, and we got enough anti armour guns dug in to take out their Schnauzers easy. The heavies're the problem."

Trixie spoke up. "One of my corporals is a specialist with shields. I think if I can get thirty or forty unicorns behind his spell, we can cut open their battle screen for a fire mission."

"What kind've repetition rate will that get us?"

"Category four spell… about two minutes to recover for the unicorns supplying the power. The corporal will be channelling it, so he might be a bit strained, but I think there's a sergeant who specializes in that. Earth pony, actually – his special talent is magic, and it manifests as the ability to hold a spell structure."

"These mechs are an important issue." One of the other commanders said. "I think the weather support platoons could do something with that storm overhead and get a few big lightning bolts from it, would that help? The scale that they'd be able to damage Akitas."

"Depends on the tactical situation as it evolves – have them build a charge up as much as they can without being obvious, though, that's too useful a plan to ignore." Caramel frowned for a moment. "Captain, how many times could you get this shield-breaker spell off in a row?"

"Three, four. Maybe five or six if some of them were Akitas and I put the reserve on it, but by that point Snips and Star Swirl are both going to be suffering mana burn."

The unicorns around the table winced. Some of them had undergone that when young – pushing more magic through their horns than the circuit could normally hold created a killer migraine – but the capacity of a horn grew much faster than the user's mana level, so the idea of overcoming it made them realize just how much strain they would be putting on the young corporal.

"The other useful talent is a lieutenant, Snails. He's got time dilation, and it can be projected."

"That means it's like increasin' the rate of fire?" Mac asked. "Veeery handy."

"Yes. And I think it might be an unpleasant surprise for those light troops if they try to put pressure on. Dogs don't really 'get' what magic can do sometimes."

"And what about point defence?" Caramel asked. "We have a fairly good network, but I think your unicorns might need to supplement it."

"There's a few good enough at low level combat magic – blaster spells, that sort of thing – that with their armour boosting their aim they can slap down missiles. And shielding work is basic stuff, takes a lot of power to stop nukes but a missile running into a shield is just going to break and not detonate."

"And if some of them do go off?"

"That's what the shields and our armour and the luck of the draw are for."

"Aaalright." Mac said. "If there's nothin' else, then everyone git some sleep. Caramel, you have the watch – you got up only a few hours ago, right?"

"Yes, Brigadier." Caramel replied. "I'll let you know when the mechs reach the foothills or the air cavalry's a quarter of an hour out."

* * *

With a jerk, Dash pulled another wire out of her wings. This one had been in between the primaries, making it so that taking it out wrecked a good ten percent of her wing on its' own.

That was the last one, though.

She looked at her ruffled feathers and bedraggled tail, tossed her mane out of her eyes again, and let out a long and heartfelt sigh.

Nothing for it. She started on the primaries, carefully realigning them one by one. The primaries and their converts were going to take about another hour, and then the secondaries and secondary converts almost as long.

At least this was out of the rain. She'd been right, there was a cave, and one benefit of a level-one biosphere like this one was that there were no animals able to live on land to occupy it.

She looked over at her little fire, and flared out her wings to it to pick up some warmth. There had been something approximating driftwood on the beach, and the air was humid enough for her to build a tiny little thundercloud and set light to it, then build the flame up to the size of a good campfire. She'd stopped shivering, which was an enormous relief.

"After this, I'm making sure to carry a vacuum tube radio." She sneezed again. "And a blanket."

* * *

"Hm."

"Sir?"

Caesar checked the map in his command shuttle, cruising at about fifty kilometres per hour over the foothills, and confirmed that the valley he had spotted was _not_ on it. "There's a narrow defile, there. Is my guess correct that it's topped by dense rocks?"

"Ah… yes, sir. We can't scan through it."

"Peel off a platoon of assault shuttles and send them into there to await an opportune moment. This storm's going to block just about every kind of scan by the time it's in full roar, and it looks like that defile will lead down to the coast by a different route to the main river. They might be able to achieve a coup de main by flying under the storm along the coast and capturing the target installation." Caesar began marking the map with icons. "Make sure the platoon commander knows to wait until the heavies can provide some cover before he seizes the installation, but also to move early and infiltrate the last few kilometres on foot."

"Your will, sir."

* * *

Trixie blinked, and came awake in seconds. She'd learned that skill back in Marine basic.

"Morning."

"Mornin'." Mac replied pleasantly over her mastoid com. "Caramel tells me the air cav is getting close."

She left her field shelter – not much, just a fox-hole dug to be inside the area of influence of a gravity umbrella – and winced as she re-entered the open. By now the hurricane had struck land, and the winds were gusting at well over ninety.

It was actually bad enough she paused and set her short-range leg implants to tractor. Set like that they pulled her down unless she was actively taking a step, stopping her from being blown over by the wind.

It was easier for the pegasi and earth ponies. The former could shape the wind, the latter were naturally steady and stable.

_I'm woolgathering._ Maybe she was less awake than she thought. "Okay, Brigadier. How far are they?"

"They ain't over the first high ridge, yet. Neither group."

She cued her displays, and checked the positions of the enemy ground units. Those were known a lot more precisely thanks to ground shocks – at least, the locations of the mechs were easy, and the APCs were doable. Infantry didn't show up at any great range.

"I recommend we ask for a fighter squadron to try and hit each group as they overtop the ridge."

"Already done. What I want you to be doin' for now is coordinating the artillery and shields."

"On it." Trixie was used to acting as her commander's tactical deputy, and had good relations with the other detachments.

She switched channels to the artillery commander. "Trixie here. How's your firepower compared to their air defence?"

"If they had stayed concentrated, there wouldn't have been much we could do." The pony in charge replied – he was from Caramel's battalion and had taken over brigade operations in addition to his own battery. "But with how they're moving that light unit ahead to the gorge, I think I could get a few bursting cruisers through."

Bursting charges on cruise missiles were intended for this kind of broken terrain. They used the missile as a carrier to get within range and on profile, then released dozens of submunitions – the split was what let them get through the close interception zone more easily than a heavier antitank round. No submunition could hope to damage a light mech – which mounted battle screen – but much of the first Dog column's air defences were provided by their APCs. At three point defence guns per each of the ten APC and five for each of the four Schnauzer, the best approach here was to strip away the APCs and then destroy the mechs.

"Fire some light antiarmour as soon as the predicted burst point is no longer line of sight to their main body. How many tubes do you have?"

"Four per battalion. Most of our kit is line of sight." Heavy lasers, railguns, that sort of thing.

"That's thirty-two total, then. Right, fire three salvoes of light antiarmour and then two antitank. If that doesn't break through their defences at least a little we'll leave it to the line of sight weapons."

"You got it. Alright, lads…"

She changed channels again to the magic support 'push', or general channel. "All magic detachments, make sure you have your armour on and staffs ready. And sidearms as well, come to that."

Marine body armour was almost proof against small arms at ranges of more than a kilometre or so. Personal shields that many unicorns could manage exceeded that degree of protection, but she was going to be demanding their every erg to deal with the heavy mechs.

The order also helped drive home the seriousness of what was about to happen, of course. The 'side arms' were what most other races would have called heavy weapons, hooked onto a harness over the armour's flanks. Normal marines had two, but one of the harness slots on a mage was occupied by their lighter staff. And under most circumstances they rarely bothered putting the other on.

At that moment, two squadrons of fighters came up the broad valley at ground-hopping height. They split into their separate detachments as they went overhead with the thunder of twenty-four overlapping sonic booms, and screamed up the side valleys towards their objectives.

* * *

"Watch that turn!" Surprise warned as her fighters approached the turn into the next river valley. "You skyline on this one and those heavies'll get a line on you!"

"Aye, ma'am," came back, by the sound of it from Mist Born. He'd had trouble with that before when flying in atmosphere.

"Okay, everyone. In fast, out fast, and don't linger!"

* * *

The last of the air cavalry had just cleared one of the highest ridges in the terrain. From now on, they were effectively out of the fire arc of their bigger brothers in the mechanized units.

They had had air breathing spy drones ranging ahead of them for some time, to pick up any potential anti-air ambush. The fighters, however, had approached from well out to sea at high mach numbers, avoiding detection for as long as possible.

Caesar didn't waste time when the alert appeared. "Emergency drop! Everyone out!"

He put action to words by taking up his weapon – a three-shot fusion lance – and jumping out of the opening back of his command shuttle. The rest of his Dogs followed, but only eight of them made it out.

The last was killed instantly in a ball of fire as a flechette fifty centimetres long and travelling at several times the speed of sound went straight through it.

The explosion wasn't dangerous to him. In emergency drop mode, his gravity harness slammed him down to the ground several times faster than gravity would normally permit and then braked at the end.

Mostly braked. He hit at thirty miles an hour, rolled once with a curse, and straightened to begin firing at the fighters.

He was an expert, using a weapon with holographic sights, as were the entire air cavalry unit. They managed to cause hull damage to two fighters, and the last to leave the valley lost shields as a barrage of missiles homed in on it.

The small nuclear warheads bracketed the fighter as it tried to dodge behind the lip of the gully connecting the valleys, then one detonated within ten metres and destroyed the right side of its' target. The overpressure threw off the pilot and slammed their fighter into the rock, producing a crash and fireball.

"Cease fire. Red and Green platoons on overwatch – I want any other fighters that try to get at us painted the moment they hit line of sight! How many of the heavy weapons made it out?"

He could already see that only two shuttles had survived intact. In the circumstances, putting them up against any kind of fortified position was pointless.

"Shuttle nineteen has a load of jeeps, sir. And two of the ones that crashed had loads of reloads for fusion lances and rocket launchers – so we have a lot of those."

"Good." Not perhaps his first choice, since there was only so much you could do with lots of ammo and only a small number of heavy weapons, but definitely better than nothing. And the jeeps were great news. They were skimmer vehicles mounting a single plasma tribarrel, all of them captured from Gryphons, and highly effective line-of-sight weapons. With the long lines of vision in the river valleys heading down to their objective, and combining the tribarrels with the fifty or so heavy weapons in the force, they would be able to keep the enemy fighters at arm's length.

"Casualties?"

"Maybe eighty dead, thirty wounded."

"Spirit." He said quietly. His entire command was only 480 troops, and with the size of the detachments he'd made there were only two hundred and eighty or so troops in this unit. Well, two hundred now, or as few as one hundred and seventy depending on how bad "wounded" was.

"Any news of the other unit?"

By way of answer his aide pointed east. There were a series of mushroom clouds climbing into the cloud layer around where the equivalent side valley to this would be on the other side of the gorge.

The meaning hit him like a punch to the gut. "Damnation. What happened?"

"They didn't get out of the shuttles in time. Gun packs ripped right through them, and then the fighters salvoed missiles on the way out."

The sound and concussion of the weapons must have been immense, but he hadn't noticed it.

"It keeps getting worse. Tell me there's good news."

"Well, there is one thing. A _Phreatic_ found a higher vantage point at the time of the attack, and one of their fighters skylined itself. The heavy commander managed to hit it, so that fighter's completely destroyed."

Caesar bared his teeth. "Cold comfort. Right, get those jeeps and weapons distributed. And a squad sent up to the lip of the gorge so they can give the all-clear to the first light battalion."

* * *

"Captain, the remaining scanners in that side valley show that their air cavalry is regrouping. It looks like their unit commander survived."

Rarity was impressed – her tactical officer had managed to collate that information and analyze it with considerable speed. "Thank you, Cloud Dancer. I'll pass that on to the Admiral and the ground forces."

Cloud Dancer – another of the occasional tactical-track pegasi, and an unusually tall one – replied in her cool soprano. "No problem, Captain." As she continued tapping away at her tac board, the sidebars became more and more detailed.

"Admiral," Rarity began straight away, "My tactical officer has made a few deductions on the air cavalry that survived that fighter strike. I'm transferring it over now."

* * *

"Fluttershy? How good does this look?"

"Er… It seems to hold… that makes sense… oh, that's interesting… it looks fine, Admiral. The new data coming in just confirms what the early analysis says."

Twilight winced slightly at the sight of the jeeps. "I suppose those mean we can't send in fighters on that target. Right, one more fighter strike today and then it's in the hooves of the marines."

"Against who?" Scootaloo asked, curious.

"Well, it won't be for a while, but attacking the main body of the enemy with shipkillers. If we're lucky we might manage to achieve destruction of some of those mediums and their missile pods."

"That sounds like work for a full deck strike, Admiral." The ensign said. "And that will remove the combat air patrol."

"If the missiles salvo while our strike is going in, we can just launch the shipkillers into that and be done with it." The sheer number of airbursting nuclear weapons would probably have knock-on effects on the planet's habitability down the line, even with "clean" hydrogen gravity pinch weapons instead of "dirty" uranium bomb compression ones. But that was something to consider if the mechs _didn't_ manage to grind through the Marine blocking position and wipe out the remaining ponies on the planet.

"True…"

"Scootaloo. Please start preparations for a full strike on the main body of the enemy. Weapons as heavy as you can. Fluttershy, any support we can give with our main missile batteries would be much appreciated."

"Okay, ma'am. If we wait an hour or so, _Cavalcade_ will be back with the fighter pilots shot out in the first engagement – transferring them to crated fighters and getting them configured should take about as long as that again, and then I'd have three extra fighters."

"Is that particularly useful?"

"We're right at the point in the curve where they could shoot down all the missiles if everything goes perfectly for them." Scootaloo answered. "If I had those extra platforms, it would mean _all_ their missiles or an equal number would get through."

"Very well. But ask Ruby to send the pilots ahead in a pinnace – we need them as soon as possible. Those medium mechs will be approaching their optimum firing range by then."

* * *

The battle started quietly.

The first sign anything was different from the long hours of waiting was a series of hisses that were barely audible over the hurricane, as twenty-four artillery tubes fired their first rounds. Six seconds later, another flight of missiles sped forward, then a third.

* * *

The light battalion advancing up the gorge was having to replace recon drones regularly as they were dashed against the walls by the hurricane. The wind was less than outside, but there were more things to run into – and occasionally the gorge's narrower sections and esoterically shaped walls channelled them to cause unpredictable gusts beyond the ability of the counter-grav drive to compensate.

Shep frowned as his newest forward scout drone detected something, then cursed and slapped the unit push channel open. "All Sierra units, air defence mode!"

Barely two seconds after he'd shouted, while some of his task force were still reacting, the two dozen cruise missiles came around the last bend. They were moving at well above the speed of sound as they came onto the final attack, and their much more powerful drives let them bull through the moving air.

They had to swing wide to reach their targets, and many of the Dog air defence guns were ready even if others were not. Laser and plasma fire crackled its' way through the missile flight, methodically destroying them as they fought to change their vectors.

One of them happened to be hit by a particularly strong gust of wind as it made the turn, and its' simpleminded computer determined that the fall of its' submunitions was satisfactory. It burst just before the air defence guns could get around to it and spilled out a dozen small antiarmour explosives, along with a larger number of electronic dazzlers.

More plasma and laser bolts flared, the Dog column eliminating all the potential threat sources one by one. Shep sighed in relief as the last source was destroyed what had to be only a few tens of metres short of detonation.

Then he realized that, in shooting down the cargo of one bursting charge, the defence guns had all pointed far back and up, at the falling munitions. Too far back for them to fully cover the _next_ missile flight, that came around the corner at that moment moving even faster than the first – and with more up to date targeting information.

* * *

As the submunitions from the second salvo spilled out and reached their optimal ranges, small counter-grav units stabilized them and their fuses tripped.

Lances of molten metal, self-forging projectiles, ripped downwards into the vulnerable top armour of the Dog APCs. Smashing armour, destroying electronics. Killing.

Seven APCs died to the second salvo. The third only spent part of its' fury on the – now far fewer – light armoured vehicles, with the remainder of them unable or unwilling to target them past the light mechs and aiming at them instead. The projectiles were unable to pierce the battle screen, but they certainly tried, and Shep's command mech nearly lost screen integrity as dozens of molten copper spears pecked away at it.

Then the antitank rounds arrived. These were far more powerful. They were effectively a single-shot light shipboard energy weapon, in fact, consisting of a capacitor and a projector. Against dense antiair they were not much use, since they needed to orient properly before firing. But their lighter cousins had stripped away most of the battalion's point defence, and they tore into the _Schnauzer/Ignimbrites._

Shep's crews were very good. They stopped nineteen of the first antitank salvo, which meant that one of the mechs survived long enough to draw all the fire of the second salvo.

* * *

"Ground shocks have ceased. The light battalion's been finished off."

"Good." Mac said. "Now, how long until that air cavalry unit's survivors reach us?"

"Not long." Caramel said grimly. "I've already got the unit from _Pinion_ on full alert."

"It's part of the reason I asked them to fire now." Trixie said. "If they'd been able to pinpoint the launchers – or even just fire on the cruise missiles as they headed for the canyon – they might have caused havoc."

"Speakin' of, you moved them as soon as the fire mission was over, right?"

"Yes. They're under their number two positions." She confirmed. "But I don't think we'll get that much more use out of the missile tubes today."

There was a cyan flicker over to their left, then the pulse of a number of heavy lasers firing followed by an explosion.

"That looked like one of their jeeps got cocky."

"Well, they'll respect us more now." Caramel said grimly.

Muzzle flashes appeared on the slope, and rail rifles began to answer. Mac assessed for a moment, and nodded to himself.

"Send the unit from _Mystery_ to the same flank. We've pretty much confirmed no survivors from the other half of the air cavalry."

Caramel relayed the order, and ponies began trotting briskly over to the left flank in ones and twos, taking care not to silhouette themselves.

* * *

Dash brushed her wings one more time, and looked them over with satisfaction. Finally, she was finished. Now all she needed to do was work out which way it was to the base, and go ask for a snack as coolly as possible.

Then she heard something over the roaring of the waves and the wind. To be audible through _that_ it had to be either very loud, or very close by…

She almost ran out to see what it was – she almost flew – but caution dictated she be as careful as possible, and she peered around the corner of her little cave out towards the ocean.

There were three heavy lift shuttles flying only a little higher than the huge waves, on their air-breathing turbines.

Dash's mind raced. This was the shoreline, it was easily in reach of space-based interdiction fire from the fleet. Why weren't they destroying the shuttles?

_Right. They can't _see_ the shuttles. This is an enormous hurricane, it's at least category four, the intensity is enough to block out most EM wave sensors – whether by radio interference or straight up blocking of line of sight. Gravity sensors can't do anything because they're not using counter gravity. And the remaining methods can be taken care of by a low power stealth field – not to mention how the hurricane must be generating hundreds of false positives anyway._

_What do I do?_

She took stock. She was feeling a little hungry, but she'd eaten shortly before her last sortie and she'd warmed up enough to stop herself getting hypothermia. Her wings were back together again, which meant she could keep the wind from getting to her – the wings were the focus of much of a pegasus' magic – and…

She gave a grin.

_Got it._

With one last check to make sure the shuttles were out of sight, she took a brief run-up and launched herself into the air. Flapping hard, trying to avoid being seen should one of them double back, she rose into the cloud layer and was safe. The hurricane's masking effect would work both ways, after all.

But she wasn't after safety.

Higher and higher. The storm buffeted at her, but she didn't care. She was moving, and she was going _up._ Along didn't matter now, up did.

Barely three minutes after takeoff, she broke through the top of the cloud layers. A single blue speck above an expanse of white, easily five hundred kilometres across.

Higher. The air was becoming thinner, harder to breathe. That was a good sign. It meant she was nearly high enough.

The air was also harder for her wings to push against. Okay, she was nearly there…

_Now_.

She levelled out briefly, then tucked in a wingtip and flipped over into a dive.

* * *

The first bit was the _time critical_ bit. She had to flap as hard as she could, build up speed as fast as she could. This was the bit where she could accelerate easily, and every wingbeat sped her on her way downwards.

One. Two. One, two. Wings forward at a dead angle to minimize air resistance, then flip them perpendicular to her direction of travel and push, then repeat.

The forward phase of one wingbeat eventually slowed her almost as much as the backward phase accelerated her.

No more flapping. This was the _posture_ critical bit. The phase in which she couldn't accelerate herself at all, but she had to let gravity do it for her.

She fell, felt her bones flex as she stooped downwards. Wings out behind and as streamlined as possible, front hooves forward and with as little wind resistance as possible. She punched into the hurricane once more, but she was already going fast enough that the effects of the wind meant little to her.

The feel of the air on her flight surfaces was like a speedometer. She was nearly to the third phase…

At nearly seven hundred kilometres per hour, and well into the hurricane, she reached out to the wind with her pegasus magic and _pulled_. For most it was instinctual, but she'd refined it. She'd had to.

The air shaped around her, streamlining her drop to minimize resistance. As it passed her rear hooves, the air shield dropped back in to nothing, and the turbulent air she was passing through slammed into the back of her "cone" of air. She was pushing herself forward with nothing but weather magic.

This was the _distance_ critical section. At her current speed, she could make it through the entire eight-kilometre cloud layer in barely thirty seconds. Piling into the ocean at this kind of speed would be unpleasantly fatal.

But she'd done this before. She _could_ do this. She was Rainbow Dash.

It was on her cutie mark, after all.

_Boom._

* * *

"Twilight!" Scootaloo shouted, disbelief and joy mingled in her voice. "Look! I'm bringing it up on the main screen!"

An image of the hurricane came up… but there was something else, something knifing through it and dispelling it in an expanding radius as if it had never existed.

"Is that-"

"Yes!" Fluttershy, _Fluttershy_, shouted. "Yes! _That's a Sonic Rainboom!_ _She's_ _alive_!"

* * *

Pinkie began cheering. "Knew you were too tough to stay down, Dashie!"

* * *

AJ grinned quietly. "No plasma cannon's gonna stop you, eh, RD?"

* * *

Rarity smiled with quiet dignity. "Ah, dear me, but it's good to know she's back."

"Alert!" Cloud Dancer said suddenly. "The clearing of the hurricane has revealed three assault shuttles closing in on the installation on a sea level profile!"

"Fire forward chasers at them." Rarity ordered, watching the tac display as it careted the new threats – and confirmed that the rainbow streak of light that was the Colonel was out of the threat zone, headed for the installation itself at mach one.

"And organize a pinnace to go and pick up Colonel Dash." She added, as _Harmony_ swung to point her bows at the planet. "I'm sure she's anxious for a towel, if nothing else."

* * *

Dash flew onward in the coruscating corona of her Sonic Rainboom, that strange boundary condition of speed and weather magic and the sound barrier that supercharged any pegasus that could reach it – which, nowadays, more or less meant her. She'd managed to turn from vertical to horizontal inside a five-meter turning radius utterly effortlessly, which would normally be over sixteen hundred g and crush her instantly.

And, of course, she no longer needed to even maintain effort to keep her speed up. It was sort of like surfing.

She made a quick loop in mid air to check on how things were behind her. There was a front of expanding clear sky-

A flash-

And three slagged heavy lift shuttles falling in pieces into the water. Nice to know that her plan had worked.

_Now, where's the installation again? Western end of the river delta, right?_

She spotted it as she remembered, and with a conscious effort broke out of her Rainboom. Air resistance abruptly had meaning again, and she tumbled for a second before regaining smooth and level flight at an easy couple of hundred miles an hour.

Alighting on the cleared area and cantering in under the blue dome of the battle screen – this jury-rigged version had nearly two metres ground clearance – she went up to the door and knocked.

After a few seconds, a suspicious looking unicorn opened the door with a laser rifle levelled at her, enveloped in the glow of his horn.

Dash grinned at him. "Hi, my fighter broke down. Can I use your phone?"

* * *

Fido watched in disbelief as the hurricane vanished like a dream, accompanied by a rainbow ring of fire and a rumbling shockwave that shook the ground.

"What just happened?"

"It must have been some kind of magic effect – we can't analyze it."

"Spirit of the _stars._ And we've lost fully a third of our light component, our entire air mobility section and most of their soldiers."

"Caesar's last report was that their positions are mainly dug in on the hilltops. They were putting in something like four times his numbers into the battle when he reported in, and we detected seismic shocks consistent with three hundred-ton fusion mortar rounds on his position shortly afterwards. Our best guess is that they finally got his last or second-to-last point-defence jeep, and then just poured the firepower on until his cover collapsed. And their cruise missiles were better than anticipated in the gorge as well. Shep's telemetry shows they have light antiarmour rounds possibly copied from current-model Gryphon Legion artillery in their cruise missiles, and their heavy antiarmour is powerful enough to strip off the shields of an _Ignimbrite_ in a single square hit."

"Risk to the heavy units?"

"Low. They were firing salvoes of twenty-four, and given how narrowly the first penetrations of the air defence net came in I doubt they have more tubes than that. And it would take at least five or six hits to overwhelm the screen of a _Pyroclastic_ with those lasers – I doubt enough would survive from a salvo to do that, even if they did make it through our point defence umbrella."

"Right. Well, let's see how they like saturation missile fire. Time to optimal range?"

"Twenty minutes. The closer we get, the less tracking time they have – I'm balancing that with the lower speed the projectiles will have. But, of course, the slower they are the less they have to pop-up for ridges." Pop-up was the effect of rounding a corner or ridgeline with a fast missile or aircraft – it overshot, and made a good target.

The aide checked a screen, stumbling slightly as the _Phreatic _heavy mech ground a terrace to ruin under its' tracks. "We have enough topographic data to plot a flight path, at least."

The missiles from a _Pyroclastic_'s pods were about as dumb as a guided missile could conceivably be. Intended as a counter to more sophisticated electronics, they flew precisely the programmed path – with no deviation possible after the flight plan was locked in. This made them more or less immune to electronic countermeasures – they didn't "listen" to anything, so they couldn't be fooled.

"Hold fire until then, then, but keep a constantly updated firing solution plotted. If they decide to try a launcher kill with those fighters of theirs, I'd rather use them than lose them."

"By your order."

"I'm almost hoping they do come in, actually. It takes long enough to re-equip fighters that they can only hit us once before the gorge – and after that the sight lines are clear and we're home free."

The aide looked dubious.

"Alright, as home free as we can be when there's a brigade in a good blocking position right ahead, anyway."

* * *

AN: Cloud Dancer is a fun little reference. She'll go far. Mist Born, meanwhile, checks off a reference to yet another one of the David Weber series, being named for one of the supernatural Courser horses.

And the Sonic Rainboom scene was _so_ much fun to write, it's amazing. I've been waiting two chapters to write that.

And Snips and Snails being Marines for even longer. I also think that power Star Swirl has in this is a fairly reasonable "Earth Pony Element of Magic" ability.

* * *

Useful Notes:

* * *

Carrier rounds.

Carrier rounds are one of the solutions adopted by some armies to the problem of enemy task force point defence.

While simple saturation is always a possibility, this can be prohibitively expensive in ammunition if one is to try and have enough rockets or artillery rounds make it through to do damage – and this also necessitates having enough launch platforms.

The carrier round aims to increase damage potential against relatively light units by carrying many rounds per shot. These split when they have the right trajectory to reach the enemy, which can be many kilometres away with high angle artillery, and multiplying many times the number of threat sources from a single launcher.

Some Gryphon Legions, notably the Firelords, take this to the extreme by using heavy bombardment rockets like these in single-shot Multiple Rocket Launch Systems. The resultant rain of antiarmour charges is capable of scouring any threat from the face of the planet in spite of heavy point defence – but at the cost of losing much of their striking power until they spend around an hour reloading, and of course a substantial ammunition requirement.


	6. Chapter 6

"Alright, Admiral." Scootaloo said as her board went green – except for a single amber telltale on First Squadron's status.

It had taken a frustratingly long time to get the shot-out pilots like Minty and Sparrow into their replacement fighters, since they had to run a complete calibration on the craft as well as the normal arming routine.

"Fighters armed for ground attack and ready to launch in thirty seconds."

"Do so immediately. That Dog brigade is too close for comfort."

"Aye, ma'am. All fighters, scramble! Form up on the way down!"

* * *

_Harmony_'s own squadron was the last of all to launch, since Minty had been the source of the amber telltale. Her new fighter had been the only one left in the capital ship's hold, and with the mess Applejack had created building the new shields taken into account it had left her a few minutes behind on her flight cycle.

The fighter bay crews had laboured heroically to make up the time, but the result wasn't quite enough. They were maybe twenty seconds behind the rest of the fighter attack as nearly seventy fighters screamed down into the atmosphere, pulled up just short of the ocean and began flying a wave-skipping profile.

Minty cursed. The only thing worse than being the first in on a strike like this was being last out, and she'd condemned her friends in First Squadron to it. And herself, as well.

_Focus._ She checked the decoys – those weren't exactly designed for atmosphere, as visual identification was often possible at such short ranges, but they would prevent the heavy guns of the mechs targeting the fighters before they popped up over the intervening ridgeline.

_And isn't that a cold comfort._

* * *

"Fighter launch detected." Fido's aide said, with a slight edge of apprehension in his voice.

"All task force elements, halt in place!" The Brigadier-general commanded immediately. "_Pyros_ to launch missiles now. All Lucky elements," the light battalion, "spread out, go to ground, guns on air defence mode. Heavies get some separation, configure for defence."

The _Pyroclastic_ mechs had begun raising their missile packs as soon as he gave the order. They were mounted on three-meter telescoping stalks, to give them enough clearance for their powerful counter-grav drives.

When they reached full extension, they paused for a moment to align… and then they launched, in a torrent of missiles close to that of the entire assault fleet that had brought them here.

* * *

"Missile trace!" Cloud Dancer warned, bringing up the plot. "Estimate two hundred-forty, that's their entire loadout. Ground countermissiles launching."

Twilight bit back a curse. "Fighters to continue the strike! Open channel to Macintosh."

"Open." Scratch said tersely.

"Brigadier, I can't divert the strike. You're on your own."

"No problem. You stop a few of those mechs, and we'll still be here to stop the rest."

* * *

Mac looked at his tactical display as the channel closed, winced, and gave a nervous glance at the entrenchment of his command post. It was good… but nuclear weapons fired in job-lots were enough to make anyone nervous.

* * *

The ten _Pyroclastic_ mechs in the Dog assault brigade launched a total of two hundred and forty counter-gravity cruise missiles. They accelerated hard, their airframes creaking with the strain, and sped south towards the Marines.

Some of them weren't able to take the force. One lost its' flight surfaces and smashed into the ground shortly after launch, the tiny puff of hydrogen that had been its' warhead escaping into the atmosphere. Another disintegrated completely mid-flight.

Two more fell prey to engineering faults – their computers hadn't receipted the flight plan properly, and they fell to the ground in front of their launchers. A point-defence gun on the launching _Pyroclastic_ quickly destroyed them in case the detonation function was still working.

But over ninety-eight percent of the weapons remained, and they shot over the intervening distance in seconds. The flight rose shallowly to pass over the first of the pair of high ridges, dipped slightly, then popped-up over the second ridge and went into a dive.

The flight path had to be as close to the ridgeline as possible to minimize the tracking and engagement time the defenders would get. Sixteen more missiles were lost when they dipped too close to the ridge, hitting it like so many ancient round shot and loosing showers of dirt and rock – for by now they were travelling very fast indeed.

Two hundred and twenty missiles remained. As they passed over the ridge, a flight of nearly a hundred countermissiles met them coming the other way. The countermissiles had been hurriedly emplaced in jury-rigged launch cradles on the river floodplain hours before, and they gave what help they could.

Sixty-nine more attack missiles were destroyed by the countermissile manoeuvre before bursts of fire from the mechs removed them, and then it was the turn of the Marine brigade and their own point defence.

Ion bolts, laser cannons, railguns and even their lighter sidearm equivalents sent out a storm of fire, winnowing the barrage heavily. The automated heavy weapons claimed ninety-five missiles, the small arms fire another twenty-four, and volleys of blasting spells from every unicorn incapable of running a shield destroyed fourteen.

Of the remaining eighteen missiles, most of them had been set for an overly optimistic burst height – since Caesar hadn't been able to tell the existence of the magical shields. Thirteen of them did not detonate before they hit the shields, and only three missiles managed to explode – their fireballs incinerating the other two.

Of course, to those on the ground, three was quite enough.

* * *

Trixie's horn and eyes blazed with rainbow witchfire as, running on the ragged edge of a reaction-enhancement spell, she slammed the hardest shield she had ever come up with around one of the warheads in a bowl shape. The opening at the top forced the detonation to expend itself harmlessly into the sky.

Snips and one of her sergeants caught her as she collapsed, utterly spent.

* * *

The universe heaved.

Fortunately for the majority of the force, the nukes had gone off so low that they were below the tops of the foothills in which the Marines had entrenched. Thus, only a relatively small portion of the force actually caught the direct blast.

For them, however, there was no hope.

Most of _Pinion_'s battalion and some of _Mystery_'s were in the valley the first warhead airbursted over. A few – a very few – of them were dug in deep enough that the wash of plasma was unable to reach them. These lucky ponies, mainly from a squad with a particularly experienced old sergeant, survived despite having been only a few hundred metres from the explosion, though they emerged into the glassed hell more than a little rattled from the miniature earthquake caused by the ground shock.

The second detonated around three kilometres from the first, and was low enough and close enough to a small terraced ridge to throw several hundred tons of earth and boulder clay into the sky. The blast itself killed several hundred ponies, mainly from _Hyacinth_ and _Brindle_, and the shower of huge rocks sprayed out across much of _Harmony_'s battalion's position.

The two air shockwaves unseated a large portion of the painstakingly dug in heavy weapons, damaging their protective berms and shaking many of them hard enough to break the more delicate components.

And the very last of the flying rocks spitefully landed square on top of Caramel's command post.

* * *

As the Dog missile pod salvo hit, the Equestrian fighters crested the ridgeline all along its' length.

One heavy mech was lucky enough to have its' port gun battery pointing in the direction of a fighter as it topped the ridge. The mech's central computer fired automatically.

A spike of fusing plasma connected the two and the fighter exploded instantly, its' battle screen no defence against three plasma cannons at such short range.

Lances of plasma sleeted from the faster-traversing cannons of the light and medium mechs, destroying two more fighters and forcing another into a crash. But far more fired at decoy missiles, which were harder still to hit in the first place, and the flurries of fire from the infantry couldn't hit fighters with any degree of accuracy in the first place.

Missiles flashed from external and internal launchers on the fighters. The external launchers fell away as soon as they'd released their payload, reducing the strain on the fighter drives and giving them precious extra agility, and the wing left relatively unmolested.

The Dogs were far too busy to shoot them on the way out.

Medium _Pyroclastic_ class mechs mounted twelve point defence stations, and the larger _Phreatics_ had around twenty. The larger mechs accepted a relatively small increase in active defences as the price for their much heavier _passive_ defences, including Battle Screen on par with most line-of-battle ships, and also as what allowed them to mount six colossal plasma cannons in two turrets.

It was a design decision that had both proponents and opponents, since the secondary function of point defence guns was their use on ground targets. Some Dog designers held that the defensive and offensive strength of a heavy mech was best increased by adding to the number of smaller guns, allowing it to cut through light forces much quicker and even stress the shields of other heavies. However, the design philosophy which had prevailed in the fractious Dog Khanate had been the one that stated only another heavy was a threat to a _Phreatic_ mech.

The resultant design had won many ground wars on Dog planets during their perpetual civil wars… but it wasn't as good at dealing with large fighter strikes.

Each fighter carried four internal ship killers, and four external ones on their ordnance racks. Sixty-four fighters had managed to achieve lock before being destroyed, making the salvo they launched over five hundred missiles strong. Against that many missiles, even a fleet's point defence would have been strained – and while the ship killers were "dumb" for spacecraft missiles, their internal computers were _quite_ sufficient to target objects that were moving below thirty kilometres per hour.

Nearly three hundred point defence guns blazed upwards. The ones on the front and the flanks of the mechs were able to fire two shots each over the time it took their targets to come in for detonation, but the rearward facing guns suffered from restricted target selection.

Nineteen missiles were able to confirm their targets, orient their single emitters and detonate. Focused blasts of gamma radiation, the bomb-pumped lasers, stabbed downwards at the mechs.

Fido's command mech took a single hit, which formed gyres of deflected energy across the shield – the multi-kiloton _Phreatic_ shook like a schooner in a gale, and what energy managed to bleed through the still-intact battle screen blew a crater half a meter deep in the battle steel war hull. But the screen _had_ held, and for a heavy mech that was a mere dent.

Others were less lucky. No fewer than four missiles targeted the number two _Phreatic_, overwhelming the battle screen and destroying both main turrets. The heavy was still mobile, though half its' crew were dead, but would be limited to a supporting role in the coming battle.

Two _Pyroclastics_ were destroyed by three missiles each, the main battle screen projector on another _Phreatic_ was wrecked by two lucky strikes that hit the same place on the shield, and most of the surviving medium mechs had great divots blown out of their armour.

The multiple shockwave from the warheads threw APCs and light mechs around with ease, but they sustained relatively little actual damage – most of the explosions that had been initially vectored down had been focused into the needle beams of the lasers, and what was left "only" stove in the sides of two APCs and turned an _Ignimbrite_ upside down.

* * *

"Analysis!" Fido called, as soon as the world had slowed down its' spinning enough for him to concentrate. Nausea clung to him, but he fought it bitterly. "Our attack, their attack?"

"We picked up at least three airbursts. Less than we had hoped for, but they were widely spread – that kind of overlap is going to have ruined their coordination and probably killed most of them."

"At least there's some good news. And what shape is the task force in?"

"One heavy has no screen, that's four, and two has lost both turrets –curst lucky they didn't have the reactor blow, after that. Three's supporting medium mechs have both been destroyed, and the remainder are reading armour integrity lower than standard – probably minor damage. Light force losses aren't complete write-offs but they're essentially not recoverable in the short term."

"How's our anti air cover?"

"If they have the missiles to make another attack like that, they'll do even more damage. We lost more point defence guns than they lost fighters, proportionally."

"That gives us about half an hour. Deploy the mediums in front of the heavies, put heavy two behind them and heavy four at the rear of the column. Light mechs to scout and APCs to use heavy two as a shield for use at a later date. Put the disembarked infantry on the hull of heavy two for now, they can ride until we're nearly through the gorge. Any track damage, or can we still make the estimated contact time?"

The aide's eyes flickered over his screens as the column rumbled back into motion. "Some track damage, but not enough to severely affect off-road speed. Two lost three tracks from secondary explosions when the port turret was destroyed, but it still has the remaining five and the loss of the turrets has reduced its' weight enough to keep up. Estimate fifteen minutes to the blocking position."

* * *

"Hello, Colonel." Twilight said, glancing aside as Rainbow Dash came onto the bridge.

"Hi, yeah. What happened in the strike?"

"The detonations are still causing interference. We're waiting on an update."

Scootaloo looked up from her board. "I'm reading just over sixty fighter transponders. Looks like the Dogs scored four hard kills – no, three and a crash, that's Wind Whistler. She reported she is laying low and has since gone off air."

The results of the fighter strike began to filter in first, aided by the relatively huge power signatures of the mech reactors.

Dash winced. "Not as good as it could have been."

"True, but for all practical purposes they've lost the use of two heavies and two mediums. Not terrible."

Scratch gave a quick warning with a hoof signal, and then a static-hazed channel opened on the main screen.

"Admiral. We're still here, somewhat."

"Brigadier Macintosh." Twilight said with some relief. "I'll let your sister know you're alright."

"Eeyup, though we took a lot of casualties. Colonel Caramel didn't make it, and ah'd appreciate it if you'd let me tell AJ that."

"Oh, no." Twilight looked down for a moment, then turned back to the screen, composure in place. "Effective capability?"

"We're at about sixty percent strength. Magic support companies're mostly intact, though Trixie's out cold. She blocked one of the nukes completely, and ah'd say about five hundred ponies down here owe her their lives."

"What do you mean, blocked – why would that knock her out? I thought she said stopping a missile with a shield was easy, it just gets crushed..."

"There's the rub. Her eyes lit up like hearth's warming eve and she made some kinda bowl around it as it went off. Deflected the whole thang's blast right back into the air."

Twilight frowned for a moment, calculating. "There's no way she could have been able to do that. _I_ don't have that kind of power, and I know our relative magical strengths from Shetland… wait, her _eyes_? Not just her horn?"

"Eeyup. And all kinda colours, too. Not just her pale blue."

"Celestia…" Twilight whispered. "She must have directly tapped the innate magic field itself. I thought that wasn't actually consciously possible."

"Well, whatever she did, it's why a lot of us're still here. Though most of the heavy guns're dismounted, we'll have to slew 'em manually."

"At these kinds of ranges that's less of a hardship than it could be." Twilight said, considering. "And has Fluttershy sent you the appraisal of the damage to the enemy heavies?"

"That she has. Ah'd like it to have done more, but ah 'preciate that they did all they could." He nodded to Dash. "You got yourself a good wing there, Colonel. An' thanks for the clear skies."

"Thanks."

"Well, ah'd better get on with makin' us ready for th' guests." With that, he closed the channel.

Fluttershy tapped something into her console, frowned, then input something else. This seemed to satisfy her more.

"Fourteen minutes left until the final engagement. And their transport is still sitting in its' rough-field landing spot, with a battalion of light units dug in around it and most of their static artillery. We can't take them out from up here, but that's only true if they keep their static defences up – if they move to support the attack, we can get at them."

"Thank you, Commander." Twilight sighed. "Stalemate, except for the remaining heavies. Everyone get yourselves a quick snack or something, back here in ten minutes. We won't have the time to spare after then, one way or another."

* * *

With a co-ordinated heave, three earth ponies pushed a railgun to the top of the hill it had fallen down. Two of them began setting up tractors to hold it in place as much as possible, while the third ran another diagnostic check.

"Five ready rounds, DSFSLRP…" she muttered. The railgun rounds were accelerated with aid of a sabot, which was discarded shortly after the shot left the barrel. It also had fins to either side to stabilize it, but the main damage was done by a rod of iridium – the same material as that of a Gryphon combat vehicle, and one of the densest metals known. Against shields they were ineffective, but against an unshielded target they could often cause substantial damage, travelling as they did at tens of kilometres a second. The trail of plasma and ablated metal they left behind them caused them to look a lot like a "death ray", rather more in fact than actual lasers.

"Looks like it's charging properly." She finished with satisfaction. "This one came through."

To either side of them other teams did the same, and more railguns along with heavy lasers and the occasional medium plasma weapon rose over the lips of their positions. The energy weapons didn't have the recoil problem and had no tractors to hold them.

Roseluck and the rest of her artillery section started back downhill, this time for a heavy pulser. The tiny darts it fired were able to open thin skinned vehicles at range, and damage the exteriors of larger ones once the shields were down – less useful than most of their arsenal, but there were at least a hundred Dog soldiers in among the enormous tracked mechs. And being shot by a fusion lance or a sniper was every bit as fatal as a plasma cannon.

* * *

"Time?" Twilight asked.

"Two minutes." Fluttershy replied, bringing up a 3D plot of the area of battle. "They're intensifying their recon drone commitment, trying to get a good look at our defences."

"Thank you. Captain, this is the Admiral. Fleet to move out of the firing line of a heavy mech in the gorge exit."

"Understood, Admiral." Rarity replied formally.

"Scootaloo, how long until the fighters are ready?"

The amber pegasus flared her wings in frustration. "I can't do any better than the last estimate. At least sixteen minutes. The bay crews are already tired."

"Okay, sorry." Twilight backpedalled.

Scootaloo gave her an apologetic look. "No, no, it's fine. I'm just annoyed by it myself."

"Right. Scratch, open a channel to Mac."

"Open."

"Brigadier… good luck. Wish we could give you more support."

"Thanks, ma'am."

* * *

Mac's marines were as ready as they could be. The moment the first light mech showed itself, a lattice of medium energy weapons – the type from a battle harness, not the heavier emplaced ones – strobed across its' shields. No pony fired more than once at a time to deny the chance of back-plotting locations, and they used the hills to shift their positions between volleys.

After three or four seconds of this nibbling away, the driver of the _Ignimbrite_ mech lost patience and fired at the top of the closest hill. A spray of mud and glass went up from the point of impact, and an unlucky marine went flying.

Two heavy lasers unmasked, the first shot depleting the remainder of the battle screen and the second blowing the turret off. It continued moving forward for a second or two, then a railgun punched through the side armour.

A shower of sparks and molten iridium flew from the hole, then its' capacitors exploded, blowing it apart.

* * *

"One _Schnauzer_ down, sir. They have at most three left."

"Two." Mac corrected his lieutenant calmly. "One of 'em got flipped by the fighters."

"Oh, sorry sir. I-"

* * *

Four of the remaining _Pyroclastic_ class medium mechs charged around the corner at almost the same moment, their first volley destroying all the guns that had already fired. Secondary guns began laying down suppressive fire, and the mechs advanced to the river crossing.

* * *

"Damn." Mac said conversationally. "Energy weapons, hold yer fire. Railguns ready to shoot on my say-so and cut the power to yer tractors. Corporal Snips, I'd 'preciate it if you'd take down those shields."

The ground shook as the port battery of a _Phreatic_ spoke, demolishing a bunker that had had less perfect camouflage than the rest, and Mac silently cursed their bad luck. Had Trixie been conscious, she would have been able to disguise their entire firing line and all the emplacements, granting them at least one extra shot each before they were back-plotted.

His reasoning behind using the railguns now was that, since without the tractor grips they would simply go flying back down the hill, they could be replaced in a different location to the one they had fired at first from. Scant advantage, but he wanted as many energy weapons as he could get for when the _heavies_ entered the battle.

There was a flare of harsh light, and a line of magic scored along the shields of three of the four medium mechs as they plunged into the river. The battle screen of those touched failed instantly, and the multiple _booms_ of railgun fire sounded.

The slugs intersected on the damaged spots from the fighter missiles, tearing deep into their targets' war hulls. Capacitors exploded, adding their stored energy to the wave of destruction.

One of the mediums lost the main turret and drive power, but apart from that it was more-or-less undamaged and continued to spit fire. A second was gutted by the iridium slugs, which ripped at power lines and control runs and, ultimately, the crew.

The third exploded violently as its' power core was punctured by the needle of flame.

* * *

"How did they _do_ that?" Fido asked incredulously.

"Unknown. There was the visual flare associated with magic, which suggests-"

"_Damn_ it."

He winced as the fourth medium mech in that attack ran over dozens of mines in the ford, cutting its' tracks and rendering it immobile.

"Alright, keep the remaining _Pyroclastics_ back. _Phreatics_ to the front, and don't take any more chances!"

With a snarl, he turned back to the tactical display. At least the flicker of defensive energy fire was relatively light.

Mech three was firing over the top of two, gradually immolating the hillsides which the ponies were using as defence, while two shielded its' counterpart and secondary weapons stabbed out at anything that showed itself.

* * *

"Come on… come on…" Fluttershy whispered, looking at her smaller plot rather than the one in the big holotank.

Then she pressed a key – and the screen showed _signal not found_.

Her eyes widened, and she looked up. "Admiral, I can't- oh, stupid! I forgot, I gave the relay to Caramel!"

"What is it, Commander?"

"I spoke to the research team when we first arrived, and they said their main focus was work with antimatter – they have a positron cannon concept but it's not properly finished, and their explosive state material looked more effective with the time we had. I got all the antimatter they had produced together, put it in a jury-rigged missile with the drive removed and buried it in the gorge. I planned either for Caramel to detonate it when the heavy mechs reached the end of the gorge or to do it myself with the relay he carried – that's where the signal was rebroadcast since I can't send something powerful enough from here, the main detonation commands on the ship are lidar and-"

"Okay, slow down!" Twilight said sternly. "Sorry, but you were getting hysterical. So you mean that when the Colonel died, the remote was destroyed?"

"Or buried. I have to use a high frequency that doesn't penetrate rock well in order to get the signal down to the ground, so it might just be under the rubble."

The command crew turned to the chaos on the ground as the foremost heavy mech exploded. Snips had managed to fire off his shield-breaker spell again, and Mac had unmasked almost half of his guns to pound their way through the armour belt.

With another thunderous blast of plasma, the one behind it came through the wreckage with both turrets using sequenced fire.

Twilight made her decision. "Scratch, open a channel to Mac." She paused for a second to let the other unicorn do so. "Mac, I need you to assign all you have to spare to dig up Caramel's command post. Have the head of the operation in contact with Fluttershy, they're looking for something specific."

* * *

The currently attacking _Phreatic_'s shields crackled under a haze of slamming close-in energy weapon fire, and as the battle screen began to show failure patches the railguns spoke again. Secondary weapons were cut away, but the war hull of an undamaged heavy mech was on the limits of what their heavy weapons could handle.

They had even heavier ones, a few 25cm plasma guns, but they'd proven nearly impossible to move back to the tops of the hills.

The last secondary weapon fell off. Mac gave a signal, and dozens of unicorns launched antiarmour rockets with telekinetic shoves in place of the launch tubes.

Capacitor-fed lasers bit deep, and the second mech went into emergency shutdown to avoid its' power plant exploding from the damage.

Now free from the immediate perils of a heavy mech about to grind his position to rubble, he turned to Trixie's second-in-command. "Clover, ah need you an' as many as y'all kin spare to go and excavate command post two. Contact th' old lady's tactical officer, she'll tell y'all what to look for."

"Aye, sir." She replied, and indicated half of her reserve squad with a series of light beams. "Follow me. Snails, you stay here. Hit the next mech to come over with a time-dilation spell."

"You got it, ma'am." The sergeant replied, horn already lighting as he began building the complex spell structure.

Mac switched channels. "Everyone with a survivin' heavy weapon, we're gonna get a few seconds opportunity when the next mech comes over. Unload all you got, aim for the main guns."

He was running out of tricks. Reports were that Snips had collapsed after his last shield-break spell, and to affect the space a heavy mech would take up would exhaust Snails almost as fast. And the railgun magazines were nearly empty... to say nothing of the energy weapon charges. They'd been running off capacitors brought down earlier, and those which survived successive tithes from the nukes and the plasma cannons couldn't run them for much longer.

For that matter, the brigade was down to strength little more than that of a regiment – he might well run out of _crew_ for the heavy guns.

* * *

"That has to have been some of the last of their magic and their missiles!" Fido said, his eyes bright with battle-fury. "We know it tires them to do magic… they're breaking! Push them!"

Engines snarled, and his command mech started forward. Behind him were the remaining two _Phreatic_, the four _Pyroclastic_, the two _Ignimbrite_ and even the infantry.

It might perhaps have been more prudent to stay back and plan things out, but he couldn't accept that. Not when they'd killed so many of his pack-brothers, and they were _right there_.

_Dogs_ couldn't have stood much longer than this, not facing the incredible monstrosities of heavy mechs. His every instinct told him that one more push would see him through the pony line – recon drones were already showing it as dangerously thin.

"Hell or victory!" he called, and hundreds of voices answered him – from the other mechs, from the infantry outside or in their APCs, and from his command crew.

* * *

Clover strained at the limits of her telekinetic capability, lifting the enormous boulder that had crushed Caramel and his aides.

"Okay, ell-tee." Her sergeant said encouragingly. "Nearly up… okay, move it to the side a little… and down."

She huffed explosively as the boulder came to rest, and staggered slightly. Two of the other unicorns in the section supported her, and she began picking away at the lesser debris.

There were no flies or fly-analogues, luckily… but the sight was still sickening. She lifted Caramel's body, carefully not thinking about what she was doing too closely.

"There!" Fluttershy said suddenly in her ear. "Under the table – good, it looks undamaged!"

Clover pulled the table aside, and her sergeant lifted up the relay triumphantly. The buttons twitched as he ordered a self diagnostic.

"Seems okay – no major damage, at any rate."

"Right." Fluttershy's voice was full of purpose. She said something that Clover only barely heard, and then the brigade push came active.

* * *

"Hold tight, everyone! Ground shock in two seconds!"

Fluttershy waited as her own remote diagnostic ran. One. Two. Then she depressed the fire key.

* * *

Twenty feet down in the flash-flood deposits of the gorge, a receiver buried three days before received the authorization code it had been waiting for with electronic patience.

Capacitors fed their charge to powerful magnetic containment generators similar in concept to the gravitic ones which 'lensed' laser heads. These were far more powerful, though.

And the reason for that was in a small, nondescript box the size of a hardback book.

Normally, antimatter was hard to contain – it exploded instantly on contact with normal matter, and magnetic or gravitic containment was expensive in terms of the energy cost required compared to what could be contained. A simple puff of hydrogen gas was much more efficient.

This, however, was different. The research station had found a way to mass-produce both antimatter and the containment it required – balls of carbon atoms, with the antimatter 'locked' away at the centre, unable to touch the sides unless the cage was perturbed.

It was no good for fuel purposes. The black dust that resulted was nearly impossible to persuade to give up its' antimatter, and when a single ball did the resultant flood of gamma radiation destabilized nearby balls. A chain reaction.

This made it, incidentally, a very good _explosive_. The entire magnetic-lensing set up was a secondary refinement – all it took for an antimatter explosive with this material was a small capacitor, a graser emitter of too small a scale to do any actual damage, and a pile of dust that incidentally happened to resemble black powder.

The emitter pulsed. A single ball of carbon atoms broke open, spilling out antimatter which promptly exploded – breaking open other balls, which spilled out more antimatter… and so on. Within a hundredth of a second, the entire reaction had taken place.

Over a kilogram of antimatter had annihilated with an equal mass of matter, and the resultant energy release was cataclysmic.

The wavefront of exploding plasma met the magnetic containment, and was funnelled upwards.

* * *

Directed as it was, it had far more fury than even the largest nuclear explosive – for all that it was actually less powerful than the ship killers – and it struck the Dogs on their lower decks, where their battle screen could not possibly cover.

Fido, his remaining mechs, and the infantry that rode in company with him were utterly destroyed by the blast.

Thousands of tonnes of rock went flying into the sky.

The backspill from the gigantic torrent of plasma killed nearly thirty of the surviving marines, and the – reduced – ground shock sent all of them sprawling.

* * *

Mac looked up as soon as the world had stopped trying to shake him to pieces, and saw boulders above him.

Staying above him.

The Admiral was standing next to him, the flare of a teleportation still dying down, and every one of the boulders that had been headed for his force was enveloped in the lavender shimmer of her telekinesis. A corner of his mind wondered why she wasn't being affected by the heat pulse, then he saw the bubble of a shield spell.

"Afternoon, Brigadier." She said with forced calm. "I understand that you might be a little surprised to see me here, but we _did_ happen to be low enough for me to teleport down – and I rather thought you might need assistance."

"Well," he replied, determined not to appear rattled, "It might seem that way. But that's just because y'all don't understand marine training."

"Oh?" Twilight asked, as she carefully lowered the rocks to the surface and Mac rolled back upright.

"Mah sergeant in basic always told me that ah should be able to eat rocks and spit out gravel. So ah'm sure y'all understand, the only concern ah have right now is where to get mahself a napkin so ah don't embarrass mahself in front of a lady."

* * *

AN: This chapter was hard to write. Probably partly because it's just not a very nice subject, when there are thousands of deaths going on. In particular, yes, Caramel is quite thoroughly dead. Sorry to any fans of his, but people die in war.

Trixie's tapping the magic field checks off another of my Weber series to reference – this time the Norfressa Cycle, and buckyball antimatter is from the Legacy of the Aldenata by John Ringo.

The antimatter bomb itself feels to me like a bit of a cop out. I know it's not, because I've been setting it up since chapter two, but – well.

Thoughts?


	7. Chapter 7

Spot winced at the eye-tearing column of plasma low on the southern horizon, then stumbled and nearly fell as the ground shock arrived.

"It's over."

"Sir?" That was the commander of the light battalion and the artillery contingent that had emplaced around the _Coesite_'s landing site.

"Major Rex, while I appreciate your drive, my ship is completely unarmed and has a drive capable of barely _half_ the kind of speeds those capital ships can put out. And while your artillery position here is very good, this planet has a low level biosphere and I only have a fortnight's worth of provisions on board – the rest of the brigade took the balance of it. The ponies can literally starve us out, there's no meat here."

"But we could move-"

"No, you couldn't. I know spacecraft, Major, as well as you know your own trade. Firing in _concert_, those heavy pieces can destroy a dreadnaught, and while _concentrated_ the rest of the position can stand off a fighter assault. But as soon as you start rendering them mobile once more, they are no longer of any use. We're besieged."

"If we go on half rations, we could stretch it until help arrives."

Spot barked harshly. "Aye, but whose help? Need I remind you that this was a commitment made by Fang of much of his available forces, and that he will be expecting to present it as a done deal to the Khan – he will not inform others of our mission until we are late returning? The damned Ponies have a centralized government – and I have little doubt they have a reinforcement echelon on the way."

He took a deep breath. "Therefore, I consider continued resistance to be useless, and I order you to surrender your command before any more of us are killed."

"You…" Rex whispered, groping at his side. "Coward!"

He brought his sidearm up – but Spot moved faster, and his claws shredded that arm effortlessly. As the weapon clattered to the deck in a spatter of blood, the ship captain sighed. _Young fool. How do you think I picked up the medal for a successful boarding operation, playing the balalaika?_

I worried about you." He said, almost conversationally as he picked the weapon up. "Too much the zealot, right from the start. I'd hoped it wouldn't matter. But we cannot serve the Khan by dying here, and you cannot see that."

Rex was still staring at the ruins of his arm in shock. "You… why?"

"If we had a chance, I'd agree with you. But there's nothing but honour to lose by surrendering, and I prefer to be alive with a stain on my honour than dead with my entire command's death to follow me to the Starless Dark."

So saying, he fired the gun twice at the major. One shot hit centre mass, the other the head.

Some of his crew rushed in, to see their captain with a smoking pistol and bloody claws, and the major lying dead on the deck.

Seeing their glances, he turned. "This cur attempted to mutiny and take command of the ship. All hands ready to repel any other attempt!"

They weren't sure. It seemed awfully convenient, after all-

But their loyalty was to him, anyway. "Aye, sir!"

* * *

"Hello, Admiral? Scratch here. I've got the senior Dog on an open channel. He's asking for terms of surrender – parole when possible."

"By all means." Twilight replied, her mind going through the formulas. Despite how closely fought some wars were, for the most part the various nations in known space maintained a protocol of surrender and rules of war. She'd heard it used more often with Gryphons, but Dogs surrendering was hardly unknown.

"Tell him we accept, but we'll discuss things later. I'm afraid we still have quite a mess to clear up down here."

* * *

"That's the last platoon." Spike said quietly. "Seven wounded, thirteen effectives. The rest are dead."

"What does that come to?" Twilight asked, heavily.

"Sixty percent casualties, almost half of them in the bombardment. _Harmony_'s battalion came off relatively well, and can manage sixty-five percent of establishment once those wounds the medics can take care of are dressed."

Twilight sighed deeply. "I knew it was coming, but I can't forgive myself."

"You shouldn't blame yourself in the first place, Twi." Spike walked over. "Every one of them knew what they might be asked to sacrifice."

"I suppose." She didn't sound like she meant it.

"You do this every time. And you personally saved most of the survivors with main magical strength – bet you'll end up with another of those medals you pretend you don't have!" He said, forcing cheer.

The attempt didn't work very well in making Twilight stop moping. "Trixie deserves one more than me."

"Then recommend her. Hell, I bet Dash could get the Wing for that Rainboom of hers."

Still nothing. Spike rolled his eyes. "Okay, if you want to mope, be like that. But just make sure you're done with it in the next… ooh… twenty minutes."

"Why?"

"Because that is when I let Dame Rarity know you'd be able to meet with the captains. The control of an Admiral's schedule is a powerful weapon."

Twilight's pillow hit Spike in the face, and he toppled over backwards.

"Alright, I admit you have a point." She said calmly, acting as if she hadn't just thrown her pillow at him. "I'll wash up, and be ready for that meeting."

* * *

"Unfortunately, while many of our ships are damaged, the sheer loss of ponies and materiel among the Marine units means that any subsequent attack will have to be held off in space. If that means splitting our forces so as to prevent the enemy slipping past us, so be it." Twilight said firmly.

She turned to Dash. "I'm sorry to say that in such a case, we'd have to rely heavily on your fighters. I know they're down in strength, but they're the closest to intact we have."

"Yeah, I gotcha. We're starting to get low on ordnance, but compared to how little the main fleet has we're practically flush." Dash furrowed her brow. "We'd have to stand the carriers off at range, to give us time for several fighter strikes-"

"I think that's not acceptable either. We _absolutely_ cannot let another fleet in range of the planet. If that means fighting a close action with the _Alicorns_, then so be it."

There was an indefinable increase in tension. The one consistent thread in the modifications to all eight dreadnaughts had been the removal of much of their close-in armament. Coupled with the severe drive node damage some of them had suffered, that would both give any enemy ample time at missile range to wear them down and give said enemy a substantial advantage while _in_ energy range.

Ruby eventually broke it. "Sounds like old times, Admiral. Planning on playing us Octavia's _Salute to Spring_ this time?"

The ripple of laughter that followed was strained but genuine. Twilight's death-charge with _Bluebell_ years before had passed into legend, and her command crews had all read up on it when they found she was their admiral.

"I _do_ seem to get into these situations, don't I?" Twilight said wryly. "That said, hopefully the reinforcement echelon from Equestria should be arriving fairly soon. I wonder how-"

She never finished the sentence.

* * *

"Hyper footprint!" Cloud Dancer said, and focused in on a volume of space about a light-second from the limit itself.

Pinkie confirmed on her repeater plot and copied it to the conference room. "More information, please!"

"Working on it, XO. Four point sources, fairly large."

* * *

Twilight and Dash galloped out of the conference room for flag bridge, Rarity leaving by another door that led to the CIC as the seven electronic images of the other captains vanished.

* * *

With a clatter of hooves on deck, the two ponies skidded to a halt on the flag deck and made for their stations.

"Fluttershy, good to see you. Anything?"

"Our challenge should have reached them about a minute ago. Same time to go to their reply."

Scratch stiffened at her station, then forced herself to relax and turned. "Admiral, they didn't bother to wait for our challenge. I'm putting up their transmission on the main viewer.

Twilight's heart sank as a gryphon appeared in the video file. She was fairly large for a gryphon, and Twilight's eyes flicked to her harness, elaborately plumed helmet – _high rank, probably Dux – _and to the dappled wings of an _illustres_ family.

_Hardly the sort of person to send on a deniable mission,_ she thought to herself as the Gryphon began to speak.

"Greetings, forces of the Equestrian commonwealth who stand in orbit of this world. I am Gerda Cottomenes, Dux of the Nineteenth and Twenty-first Gryphon Legions. By authority of the Senate, I have imperium to claim this inhabitable moon as a colony. Stand aside, or your lives will not be spared." With that, the transmission cut abruptly.

That was very bad news. Imperium was military authority – granted for specific circumstances when acting outside Gryphon space. The Senate had decided to support this operation openly.

"Scratch, record. This is Admiral Green Ridge, commanding officer, Sixth Fleet. You are in Equestrian space, Dux Cottomenes. By what right do you claim it?"

Four minutes passed, during which the Gryphon ships simply sat in space, and Twilight's mind raced. Four ships, even the dreadnaught-class ones they appeared to be, was small for one legion - let alone two. There wasn't the space on those ships for either the fighter contingent of a full Legion or the ground strength, and that was suspicious.

"By right of the first claim, Green Ridge." Gerda replied smoothly upon resumption of the transmission. "This is Equestrian space, you say, but I see no colony and no space station. Only a small fleet of badly damaged warships."

"A colony is here, Gerda, as you well know." Twilight countered. "And no matter how badly our ships are damaged, we will fight to the last pony to protect them."

"A pity." The Dux said, simply, and ended her transmission.

"Twilight!" Fluttershy said urgently. "More Hyper footprints, at least a dozen! They're launching fighters, and so are the ships that already arrived!"

_Of course._ Twilight thought dully. Against this many, she had no chance. The concealment of most of the Legions was simply to lead her on, to encourage her to make a statement that could be spun as if she was willing to fight against hopeless odds. Under those circumstances, nobody would question the obliteration of her entire command and the excision of the installation.

'Of course, we offered surrender terms, but they resisted to the death.' Would be the line, and with the kind of damage a kinetic strike could do there would be no way of telling that it was a research station. And if the Gryphons took everything of value from the base first, who was to tell _that_? They could put the antimatter containment system and the positron cannon into production as their own, and nobody would be able to gainsay them.

It was unlikely to go that cleanly, of course, but they would certainly begin from a position of political strength.

"Prepare the fighters for launch." She heard her own voice saying, with an unreal calm. "Arm for dogfights. And ready the Fleet to move in support of a second fighter strike, this one aimed at their dreadnaughts."

Nobody commented on how unlikely it was that any of their fighters would return. They didn't have to.

* * *

"Hyper footprint!" Fluttershy said suddenly, just as the fighters set off.

_What, again?_ Twilight felt like crying. But she suppressed it ruthlessly. "Status and analysis?"

"At least twenty point sources in this one, Admiral." Fluttershy said. "They're almost sixty degrees further around the plane of the ecliptic, so they could be trying for an end run at the planet itself.

"That puts all three forces at the corners of an equilateral triangle, doesn't it?" Twilight asked rhetorically, thinking. "Okay. Fighter strike maintain profile, shift our vector to intercept the second group short of the planet. Maybe this one has some thinner skinned transports."

"It looks like it does." Fluttershy said. "Still a few seconds until I have lightspeed information, but two of the hyper transitions were far larger than the rest."

Twilight closed her eyes for a moment, weariness hitting her suddenly as the impossibility of their situation sank in-

And then opened them, glowing with a wild hope as she realized.

"Recall the fighters!"

"Admiral?" Scootaloo turned to her, confused. "Why?"

"I know what's going on. It's-"

**"Attention, all in the Palomino system!"** abruptly boomed from every speaker in the ship. Many of them weren't even turned on, but that enormously loud voice didn't seem to care.

**"I, Princess Luna, Diarch of Equestria, command that all invading forces leave this system – or be destroyed by my hoof!"**

She wasn't joking, either, Twilight thought giddily. By now every solid object within two light minutes was under her passive telekinetic control – that was how she was doing the voice trick. And if she couldn't move spaceships around with _much_ ease, the gas giant Palomino-d boasted a ring system.

To Luna, that might as well have been about a petatonne of ammunition. Indeed, even as Twilight watched there was a slender tongue of indigo-shimmering ring material moving out of its' orbit and heading for the Gryphon fleets.

"We did it…" Scootaloo whispered. "We won."

And that started the cheering.

* * *

"We are most impressed, Twilight Sparkle." Luna said, more quietly but no less forcefully than she had spoken to an entire star system three hours ago. "Most impressed indeed."

She and Twilight were in her private quarters on the royal flagship _Perilune_, a ship almost but not quite identical to her sisters' ship _Zenith_.

"We had time to view the summaries of your actions while our ship bore us to this orbit, and we feel our sister was fully justified in her confidence in you."

"I don't feel like she was." Twilight said. "I mean, I lost _half_ the marine contingent! Some of my dreadnaughts aren't fit for battle this side of three months of repair!"

"Ah, our sister warned us of this." Luna observed. "Thou art compassionate, and as such the loss of thy ponies is a terrible pain. But not one commander in ten could have come out of that action with so few losses, nor been so willing to put herself at risk. As did thou at the end." For just a moment, Luna looked every minute of her unfathomable age. "'Tis a terrible thing, to see others suffer in thy name."

The alicorn shook her head. "In any case, the fleet we hath brought shall suffice for defence, for now. Linger here until the repairs to thy ships' drives are as complete as they may be, and then depart for Equestria."

"As you say, your highness."

"None of that." Luna said sternly. "We may have to be formal, but that is habit – we prefer informality among friends, and if we cannot pronounce a duchess such as thine self as friend, and friend to our sister, then who shall we?"

Twilight tried to keep her surprise under control. "I… see your point, prin- Luna."

"Much better. And now, we wished to discuss thy manoeuvres in more detail. In particular, the performance of the _Athena_ system. We were involved from afar in the original conception of that advancement, and we wish to know your thoughts."

"Er, okay." She marshalled her thoughts. "Well, the thing that impressed me most about it wasn't the offensive capabilities at all. That's what it was originally designed for, I know, but the ancillary effects of defence and even long range identification are more fully developed now – except for the missile spot against the secondary echelon, we weren't able to launch salvoes big enough to _exploit_ the expanded fire control. The defensive side, on the other hand…"

She relaxed into the discussion, and Luna nodded in silent approval. It was a callous leader who forgot the pain of her subordinates, but a poor one who let it affect their performance. And Twilight Sparkle, Duchess of Green Ridge, was neither.

"Thank you." She said an hour later, as the discussion wound to a close. "We have requested that our fleet train focus their efforts on making thine ships hyper-worthy, and thus we request that thou take this with thee to our sister on the capital."

Luna lifted an envelope from her side table. "We are sure that our sister will wish to speak with thee of the events here herself. Render unto her the letter at that time."

"I will, pr-Luna."

* * *

In the event, it was a total of four days before Sixth Fleet finally left orbit around the world they had defended. _Perilune_ accompanied them as far as the Hyper Limit, the royal flagship holding position as if part of the fleet rather than an external component - a gesture of respect.

* * *

"I still feel sorry for all those brave soldiers and pilots, and for all the crew killed when missile hits came in." Twilight said quietly, while spending some time in the lounge with her friends – Trixie, unfortunately, was still unavailable, with Redheart having confined her to her bed until her magical core had properly recovered from the strain. The rest of them were there, however, since Cloud Dancer had been assigned this watch.

"Now, don't you go beatin' yourself up over this again!" Applejack admonished her firmly. "So ponies died. That happens, in case you didn't notice. What matters is makin' sure fewer die than otherwise."

"But I could have-"

"Sakes, Twilight!" The tough engineer said, exasperated. "That fleet outnumbered us better'n three to two, and the ground forces had mechs – and I didn't see a ship of ours scuttled. And Mac tells me y'all did all you could have."

"Do you think it would help if you got some kind of closure?" Rarity asked. "Because there's one idea that Pinkie and I had-"

"Yeah, I think it's a great idea!" Pinkie chipped in.

"-that perhaps you could hold a memorial service for them. It might assuage your guilt."

"What do you mean, a memorial service?" Twilight frowned.

"Sort of like a wake," Rarity answered. "Remembrance for those that were lost, and a reminder that life goes on."

"I gotta admit," Dash said, "Bit of fun would certainly help me take my mind off it."

"Well, okay then." Twilight said, slightly nervously. "If you think it's a good idea. But I've never organized anything like this before."

Pinkie shrugged. "Don't worry! I'll get it planned out – where in Green Ridge has the largest open space?"

Twilight looked off into the distance. "That would probably be Wizard Peak. It's got a large natural amphitheatre on the nearby slopes, and a lovely plateau below it that's quite warm this time of year."

"Right, I'll get right on it!" Pinkie said, pulling up a dataslate and starting to type. "Oh, I see what you mean. It does look nice. Now, if we set up a stage there… and that valley looks like a good place for a flyover to build up speed…"

"Well, we lost her." Applejack said sardonically. Pinkie looked up just long enough to stick her tongue out, then went back to her planning with a grin.

"Oh, how was Princess Luna?" Fluttershy asked. "I didn't have a chance to speak to her…"

"She's more… formal?" Twilight tried out the word. "Probably a better way of putting it is archaic, than Princess Celestia. All thee's and thou's and forasmuch's. But she mainly wanted to talk about the Athena system, at least in the first meeting we had. The second… it was about the defensibility of the terrain in the area. She's certainly got a more direct interest in the military than her sister." Twilight sighed. "Or at least, that's the impression I got. But she's a good few millennia old, she probably has interest fads that last decades."

"You've not met her before?"

"Once or twice, but only at one remove by email. Being ONI head didn't mean I met the Princesses so much, it meant I briefed their liasons and administrated the department."

"And worked on secret projects that could potentially save the Principality?" Dash asked with a wink.

"I think you already know all the secret projects I was working on." Twilight replied, before frowning. "Except for three-sigma, of course."

"What's that?" the colonel asked.

"Not telling." Twilight grinned. "Weren't expecting me to turn the tables on you like that, were you?"

"Aw, come on. Please?" Dash put her forehooves together.

"No. And no to the next one!"

"Aww, okay." Dash chuckled. "Hey, what was the name of that Gryphon that turned up a few days ago?"

"Gerda?" Twilight thought for a moment, then nodded. "I think that was it. An _illustres, _and a _dux_ in command of two legions."

"Huh. I remember Gilda mentioned her back when we were in the academy together, unless it's a different Gerda. Their families have a long-term feud going on."

"Really? Interesting. Gilda was an exchange student, right?"

"Yes, she was. Pretty good with bomber ops, less so at dogfights but still no slouch. Her family's part of the peace faction in the Senate."

"I might need to pick your brain about that later, them." Twilight caught the tone of her own thoughts, and smiled wryly. _You can take the mare out of ONI…_

* * *

"Still nothing." Scootaloo said sullenly, looking back over her flank.

"Don't worry," Fluttershy quietly comforted her. "It sometimes takes a long time for them to come in. And, er, if it's not fighter operations that are your special talent then you must be very good indeed at what is."

"You think so?" The amber pegasus brightened.

"Yes, you acquitted yourself very well. Full deck strikes are always taxing, and the operations were well streamlined thanks to your efforts."

"Thanks, 'shy." Scootaloo said companionably. "Er, I mean, Ma'am."

"No, don't worry about it." Fluttershy replied, dismissing the slip.

* * *

Twilight signed the last file on her paperwork backlog, a conduct report for _Harmony_'s tac officer. She'd endorsed it with a recommendation that Cloud Dancer be given an XO slot as her next posting, thanks to the quality of her work on this mission.

A slight smile touched her face as she remembered going over her own tac officer's file. Fluttershy's included the line "not recommended for independent command" on account of her relative timidity, but she doubted the pegasus would particularly mind. She worked well as a tactical officer, anyway.

"Finally!" She said, enjoying the feeling of having finished. That feeling soured when Spike held up another dataslate.

"Oh, what is it now?"

"The ONI report on the capabilities of the antimatter charge and the positron cannon – I know the latter was never actually fired or even brought up from the installation, but they're going to want your evaluation. Sorry, Twi," he added apologetically, "But you're the only one on the ship with Equinox clearance apart from me, and the only one with flag rank to boot."

"Fine, give it here." She took the slate in her telekinesis. "At least tell me it's short."

"Standard ONI file type four, combat report and breakdown. Should be only a few pages, since there's all the sensor data to go with it."

* * *

Dash paced back and forth in front of her desk. Two dataslates lay on the table – one of them contained all the paperwork she'd decided to put off for another day, the other was full of rejected fighter name suggestions.

"I can't use _Sonic Rainboom…_ she mused. "The _Buccaneer Blaze_ is already taken by Wind Whistler… and while the _Fantastic Filly Flash_ is an awesome move, calling my fighter that would… imply things."

While some might think this a premature consideration, to Dash it was anything but. She'd barely had _Wonderbolt_ for two months before being shot-out, and she'd been proud of the little _Aurora-_ class. She wanted her next one to reflect her as much as the last two had.

"Eh, maybe I'll see how the next one feels to me. Or maybe next time I get a chance to mess around in atmosphere, I'll invent another move and name it after that."

* * *

"Ship speed is at point oh-one cee local." Raindrops said, as the fleet approached the Hyper Limit of the Equestrian system. "Wings flared and ready for transit."

"Very good. On the mark."

"Aye, captain." With that, the hyper generators on all eight ships began to spin up for the downward transit – a rather more leisurely one this time.

A slight tremor announced the ship easing over the Theta wall, taking its' time and shedding much of the residual velocity it had. Moving at such a low fraction of light speed even before the walls let the crew adjust to local conditions, making it much more comfortable. It was less hard on the Wings, as well, which barely built up to a bluish colour with the lower power levels.

"Eta wall in twelve." The pegasus read off, adjusting the trim of the Wings to maintain company with the rest of the fleet.

"Applejack?" Rarity asked.

"No problems here, skip. Ah was worried 'bout number three left Wing bus, but-" another slight distortion washed over them, "-it seems t' be copin' just fine."

A red light lit on the engineer's panel. "Ah, horsefeathers. Ah forgot to secure the panel on that node. Don't worry, it's nothin' serious, ah just left mah tools lyin' around agin…" She trotted away from the pickup, muttering to herself.

Rarity shrugged mentally. Even if that entire node blew up, they still had more motive power than Ruby's ship – fleet acceleration would be unaffected. She might have felt more upset about damage to her beloved _Harmony_, but with the number of holes already blown in the ship another one wouldn't make _much_ difference.

"Alpha wall in three!" Raindrops said, and Rarity turned to the main screen. She always liked watching these.

The Wings flashed through the rainbow, red to yellow to blue and back again. Seven other blossoms of light appeared in normal space just after _Harmony_, one of them close enough to make out the structure in the Wings.

"My compliments to all ships' navigators." Rarity said formally. "And set course for Epona – I think we rather need their attentions."

* * *

A touch under four thousand ponies of various colours and breeds stood or sat on the crisp grass. Several still bore fading wounds, and a couple of them were only days out of bed rest. It was a point of pride to be here.

Friends and family were waiting over the lip of the amphitheatre, but for now there were only the ponies – and one dragon – of Sixth fleet, the veterans of the action at Palomino.

Twilight ascended the steps to her lectern, and spoke into the silence. "I would like to thank every one of you for coming here." Her horn glowed softly with a spell that projected her voice out into the crowd, letting everyone hear it clearly.

"We are here to remember those brave souls who did not return from the Palomino system. It is always understood that military service may mean one has to make the ultimate sacrifice, but until a person has faced death in the face they cannot know their true character."

She began to read. "Bluebird, flight sergeant. Hartwell, senior chief petty officer. Cherry Cheer, electronicist second class…"

One by one, she listed off the names of all the dead. It took most of an hour, but she couldn't feel right having done less. They all deserved the honour.

Coming to the end of the list, Twilight looked up. "Not one turned, or fled, or gave less than their all. I could ask for no more. It was an honour to command such a shining example of our navy's virtues."

She cleared her throat. "This is something I thought appropriate. It's from the Draconic religion.

"_To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sea of stars. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to reap; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace._"

As she finished, every pony there bowed their heads in silence.

A still minute passed.

"Thank you." Twilight said, ending the moment. "And now, since I've just said there's a time to dance…"

Pinkie Pie skidded onto the stage. "Why so glum, Sixth Fleet?" she called, eyes wild. "I thought this was supposed to be a PARTY!"

Fireworks detonated spectacularly overhead.

* * *

Twilight noticed a young unicorn running over to Derpy – or rather, Ditzy Doo. She'd checked with Spike and found that the name "Derpy" was actually a persistent nickname. Apparently a lot of fighter pilots got them, but Derpy found hers so hilarious she'd encouraged its' use on official paperwork.

And by the looks of it Sparkler was part of that family as well. Sister, adopted daughter… she didn't know, and she didn't really care. Family was family, after all.

"You look miles away, Twi."

Speaking of family… she turned to her brother. "Oh, shove off."

He grinned, unfazed. "You're enjoying this one a lot more than you normally do with parties, Twi. Hopefully that bodes well for Cadence and I – if we get this Pinkie to organize it, maybe you'll actually engage with our reception properly."

Twilight gave a shrug. "Worth a try. And does that mean you two have set a date?"

Cadence was one of the occasional alicorns thrown up by the branch families, her family line along roughly the same route as Duke Blueblood. On account of her unusual position, Celestia had made her the ruler of one of the principality out-systems – part of the feudal governmental system that approximately half the Equestrian star nation continued to practice.

Twilight's brother had met her at his sister's elevation to the peerage, and the two had hit it off remarkably well. She'd known that they were getting more serious, peripherally, but apparently events had moved fast in the time she was away.

"Yes, it does." He said firmly. "Give it a month, and you'll be the commoner of the family." He winked.

She giggled, then looked mortified. An admiral, giggle?

Damn Shining Armour for always doing this to her! She was an experienced commander, a duchess, a veteran, she'd run the Office of Naval Intelligence for years – and around him she always felt like the younger sibling she was.

The two unicorns were distracted by the _crump_ of several controlled explosions, as most of the fighter crew pegasi on flyby dumped volatile rainbow extract into their cloud trails. The thundering trails of flame crisscrossed the sky, and more or less put paid to conversation for the next thirty seconds.

Once it died down, Shining turned back to his sister. "Any idea where you're going next?"

"Not really. We're more of an on-call formation than anything. And it'll take another few weeks to repair _Cavalcade_ and the other really damaged ships – and I'll insist on further time after that to get Mac's marines properly worked up." Twilight looked sad again. "They're about half replacements, you know."

"Hey!" Pinkie inserted herself into the conversation, sounding upset. "You're being all mopey! It's a time to dance, not a time to mourn!"

"You really took that passage to heart, huh, Pinkie?" Twilight asked.

"I most certainly did! In fact, I might ask Spike for more details about it if it's all like that."

"I must admit, that was one of the highlights. But feel free to ask him. Oh, that reminds me – could you let some of the others know that his birthday's in two weeks? I'd do it myself, but since he's my flag lieutenant it would defeat the purpose of keeping it even slightly secret."

"Sure!" Pinkie said happily, and left humming to herself.

Twilight and her brother exchanged looks, and mutually agreed to just enjoy the party for now. Business could come later.

* * *

"Have you decided where to send them next, sister?" Luna asked, reclining on her couch.

"Not quite." Celestia replied. "Though I'd like your advice on this plan. Do you recall Bellevue?"

"The planet where the unicorns still are nobility, and the earth ponies little better than serfs?" Luna checked.

"The very same. Hopefully the highly competent, cross-breed team represented by Sixth Fleet will provide a good example."

"And, of course," Luna continued the thought, "Eight modern capital ships would provide a strong incentive for the wayward planet to reform, to qualify to 'get their hooves on the goods', as it were."

"The very idea never crossed my mind." Celestia said, winking.

"Nay. For it has found the ground far too fertile to cross, and has taken root to flourish."

The slightly elder sister looked about to say more, but subsided on hearing the approaching hoofsteps of the unicorn they wanted to see.

* * *

"Thank you for meeting us, Twilight." Celestia said, as the lavender unicorn entered.

"Indeed." Luna added. "Though 'tis only a few hours hence that we were still aboard our ship, we decided to make time to see thee since our sister was."

"Well, er, thank you both for giving me the honour."

"Not at all. Now, the main concern here is those medals that have to have royal seal, out of those you've assigned to various ponies among your command."

"For the most part, we find thy commendations entirely proper." Luna said, before frowning. "However, we think it befalls to us to make an amendment."

Twilight's mind raced. Who had she overreached herself with? Dash deserved the Golden Wing if anyone did, after her spectacular Rainboom… Trixie's Golden Horn wasn't in dispute… Giving Caramel the medal of Valour posthumously was more than an empty gesture, he'd stuck to his post in the face of a nuclear barrage to keep the command net together…

"Dear Twilight, never change." Celestia's chuckle broke her out of her reverie. "If you've sinned, it's in modesty. You're getting the bar to your Golden Horn."

The unicorn blinked, dumbstruck. The "bar" to a medal was getting the decoration a second time, and normally was exactly what it sounded like – a bar across the top of the medal itself, where it hooked onto the ribbon. "What would that even look like?" she asked, dumbly.

"It's a tiara, actually. Well, normally it's a necklace, but since you're a sitting duchess about to enter the ranks of the minor royalty you get a tiara. Complete with a symbol of your cutie mark worked in…" Celestia paused, examining Twilight closely. "I think for you it'll have to be pink tourmaline. If you're available sometime in the next week or so I can have my artificer craft it as a proper magical focus."

"I'm… I'm honoured." Twilight managed. "But I don't think-"

"Thou hast no conception of thine own worth, Twilight Sparkle." Luna overrode her. "For, sooth, thou art a treasure among our subjects." Then she winked. "And I _meant_ the plural that time."

Celestia saw by the poleaxed look in Twilight's eyes that she wasn't going to be very coherent for a while. "I'll contact young Spykoranuvellitar to arrange that appointment, then. See you later, Twilight."

"Th-thank you, Princess." Twilight managed, then bowed to both her diarchs and vanished in a teleport driven by purest embarrassment.

* * *

As Twilight left Canterlot palace complex, her flag captain accosted her. "Ah, I thought you might be around here. Please, do join us for the evening – I happen to have it on good authority that you did all your paperwork well ahead of schedule, so there's nothing stopping you."

"But…" Twilight began to protest, thinking of her duties. But then she thought more about what Rarity had said.

It was true, she'd already processed all the paperwork for the next week that wasn't critical, and that was going to arrive next morning anyway. As far as possible, her schedule was clear.

She didn't even have manoeuvres to set up, since Sixth Fleet was going to be in the shipyards for weeks – even the relatively undamaged ships like _Harmony_ needed to be refitted with better ammunition capacity, and the wreckage that had been made of _Pinion_'s internal bracing would take up almost as much yard time as the original conversion to _Alicorn_-class had.

"Who's we?" She asked, still thinking.

"Well. There's my parents, who happened to be on planet, and my sister - who's still in university, I'm sure she'd be delighted to meet you. And Pinkie said her family were available, and astonishingly AJ has a relative who wasn't on board Sixth Fleet at all – though that'll change, she's angling for the Marines, and-"

"Okay, okay, I get the point." Twilight rolled her eyes. "You basically invited everyone's family."

"Not _everyone's_ family, dear." Rarity winked. "Just the ones Pinkie and I could find at short notice. I thought it might be nice for you to meet them all, you and Dash and Fluttershy I mean."

The Admiral tossed her head slightly. "Well, it's clear to me I don't have much choice. Go on, then."

"No need to be so negative about it. You don't have to come. After all, you do outrank me." Rarity pointed back towards the palace. "In two respects, at that – _Your Grace."_ She dropped the hoof back to the floor. "In all seriousness, though, we'd love to have you."

Twilight slowly smiled. A genuine, heartfelt smile, as she felt the weight she'd carried since Palomino begin to lift. "I'd like that, then."

* * *

AN: That closes out this particular fic, making it the first time I've actually finished something. There's still that sequel hook there, though…

I'll be revising the earlier chapters somewhat.


End file.
